Experimenter

December 2012

Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other light aircraft.

Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/96284

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S t e w a r t H e a d w in d Don Stewart, who designed the Headwind in 1961 and flew the prototype in 1962, said, "At the time, everyone else was trying to go fast, but I was trying to go slow and spend as little as possible to do it. That's why I named it the Headwind, in counterpoint to the Wittman Tailwind. I saw the Headwind then, and I see it now, as an 'everyman's airplane,' an airplane that can be built by anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver to hang on to. Plus, I wanted it to be super easy to fly while at the same time having plenty of performance." Don has been a serious free-flight modeler his entire life and a longtime, hardcore student of aircraft design and engineering. (He has designed and built a number of aircraft after the Headwind and does engineering consulting.) So, when he laid a clean sheet of paper on his drafting table (that was the early '60s—he uses CAD now), all of his background and tastes helped shape what eventually took place in the drawings. He knew from his free-flight experience that low wing loadings and low span loadings gave the most performance for the least amount of power. That meant light structure and long wings. He also liked a specific look that was often embodied in many traditional free-flight model designs: high wing: low-slung, minimal fuselage; and a high thrust line as Bill Budgell of Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada, fies behind a Continental A-75 engine, which is heavier than a VW, but it gives phenomenal performance to his Headwind, which he completed in 2011. 16 NO. 4/ DECEMBE R 2012 epitomized in Alberto Santos-Dumont's Demoiselle of 1908, one of Stewart's favorite airplanes. So, there's little surprise that Don mixed all of those ideas together and came up with what is one of the most practical homebuilt, light airframes sport aviation has seen. The primary reason the Headwind is not better known is because it's not the kind of airplane someone builds to go to fly-ins. They build it to have a good time in their local area, so even after half a century, the Headwind hasn't developed a profile on a national level. "I used the triangular fuselage cross section, as used on the Demoiselle, Champ, Aeronca C-2 for the same reason those designers did," said Don. "It's quite strong and light. Better yet, it has far fewer pieces of tubing in it than a rectangular layout would have. I designed it specifically for the amateur, so it is much simpler and easier to build. This goes for every aspect of the airframe. I wanted a guy who is building his first airplane to have no doubts that he can do it." Bill Budgell of Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada, one of the latest Headwind builders, addressed the construction difficulty of the airframe by saying, "I tell everyone that there is nothing hard about building this aircraft. If I were to rate the difficulty of building on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the hardest, the average

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