Each Way Bet - The Full Story
(Part 1 - Conception)
by Trevor Hewson

This is a long and fractured story! I will begin at the beginning...

Polar Foil
In 1989 I built an electric powered canard. This was a variation on a Slope soarer called Enigma and was duly christened 'Elgar'. Whenever I flew this odd looking model at our local park, there were all sorts of astonished remarks along the lines of "Look, it's flying backwards!" The upshot of this was an April Fool article for our the March 1991 edition of club newsletter, Sloping Off, about a fictitious model I claimed to be building, due to be flight tested on the first day of the coming month. It included this sketch. Apart from the intended test flight date, I included two anagramatic clues by naming the model Polar Foil and numbering the wing section TH 910401. Apart from that though, I tried to make the narrative as convincing as possible. The model was indeed designed to fly backwards - as well as forwards, with the minimum of intervention in between. You can read the article in full here.

For a while, that was that. Then my fellow 'Sloping Off' editor and co-conspiritor Peter Chaldecott decided to have a bit of fun by submitting the piece to the UK national magazine, RC Model World. It was duly submitted for inclusion in Sean Walbank's 'Silent Flight' column in 1993 but was just a bit late and eventually appeared in the April 1994 edition of the magazine, with a few additional comments by the columnist, including the observation that "the reasoning behind Polar Foil is the product of a mind which has spent far too long watching raindrops on the window!" Such challenges to my sanity have been a constantly recurring theme throughout this otherwise ever-changing project.

The response to both publications of this piece were a little surprising, with people not only accepting that the concept was feasible but one or two even claiming to have undertaken similar ventures in the past, with varying degrees of success. So, my quest to dream up something patently absurd had failed - it seemed that I had not been outlandish enough in my thinking.

Project X
Perhaps the main concession to credibility in the original Polar Foil write-up was the acknowledgement that, in order to change flight modes, the aircraft would be landed and the cg and fin re-positioned manually before being re-launched in reverse. So, to provide a break during our many sessions spent editing Sloping Off, Peter and I began to speculate on various wierd and wonderful configurations which might enable us to have a shot at the ultimate in reversible aircraft - one which could change direction in mid-air! This picture shows what we homed in on.

The basic concept behind this design is that the whole wing flips in order to reverse the direction of flight. By mounting fins on the wingtips, the problem of re-locating the fin from one end of the fuselage to the other is circumvented. The sweepback also helps to move the aerodynamic neutral point away from the wing joiner/pivot so that with care, it should be possible to maintain the right relationship between neutral point and c.g. for both flight directions without resorting to shifting ballast around.

There were other advantages too: Because the wing travels in the same direction for both flight modes, the need for the bi-directional aerofoil goes away (actually, I was a bit sad to lose this), and ailerons can be used. Pitch control would still be by all-moving elevators / canards. Peter and I became quite enthusiastic about this approach, and drew up various mechanisms for achieving the wing-flip and latching it securely for each flight mode. We also christened the venture 'Project X', inspired partly by the large 'X' shape formed by the wings when the two configuration drawings were superimposed and partly by our desire for extreme secrecy - we told each other that the secrecy was needed so that nobody stole our ideas but, I suspect that in truth we were both more concerned with avoiding widespread ridicule if our clubmates should get to hear what we were up to!

Unfortunately, just as we got to the point where building could start, Peter had to withdraw from the project due to other time pressures. At least, that's what he told me - it could be that he just took a sanity pill. In any event, the result was that Project X was put on ice for five years or more.

Back to the Drawing Board
In April 2001, a discussion about some other April Fool article provoked me into lifting the veil of secrecy and telling the story of Project X to clubmate Mike Roach. Mike quickly got into the swing of the project and proposed a power version, circumventing the new problem of reversing the motor thrust by going for a twin, so that the motors would flip over with the wing. This prompted the following response from me:

"I agree this would work better. The trouble is, I have already taken the fin(s) off the fuselage and put them on the wings and if the motors go wingwards too, we have a perfectly viable flying wing which is just flipping a fuselage back and forth - in fact if we left the stabiliser off, it would be even easier!" As I wrote these words, I began to realise that this was the end of Project X as I had known it.

Mike though was not about to let me give up now.... Part Two