On Wednesday 03 December 2003 13:17, Curtis L. Olson wrote: > Jon Berndt writes: > > > Reminds me of the time I was 4 years old and flying in a Catalina and > > > > Are you serious? I'm jealous. One of my favorites. > > Yup, wish I had been older so I could have remembered more about it. > > > > went looking for the bathroom, because of course, all airplanes have > > > bathrooms (something I was very convinced of when I was 4.) > > > > Did it? > > Nope, it turns out that bathrooms are typically only on things like > 737's and DC-9's and stuff. > > I saw a Catalina fly at an air show a couple years ago. The thing > that I really noticed was how big the wing was relative to the rest of > the aircraft, and how slow it could fly on approach. > > Curt. > -- > Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project > Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org > Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http:// www.flightgear.org >
They had a restored/flying Cat based at an airfield near me for a while and I'd see it out and about every now and then. They have got a long wing - I guess the high aspect ratio helps the endurance. A couple of things about modelling sea-planes in FG though - a) unless you start in the air, you have to start on a runway, and b) with YASim, at least, you can't define the fuselage properly because part of it has to start below the surface and you get a collision at start-up. Dunno how JSBSim and UIUC handle this. I'd imagine the taxiing/u/c characteristics are a lot different too, especially as the hull comes up into the planing position. I'm not a sea-plane scientist, so these are really idle speculations, but we might want to start thinking about them. LeeE _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel