This is the prelim design from Swift so far:

Performance:

We plan to move:

4 185-pound people,

40 pounds of baggage,

1,000 nautical miles,

at 25,000 ft,

at at least 300 knots true, with stall at or below 61 knots true,

with a 30-minute reserve at minimum-fuel-flow power-setting at 5,000 ft,

taking off and landing in 2,000 ft at the weight with which we start the mission above.

The weight with which we start this mission will be the gross weight.

If there is still volume in the wing available for fuel after meeting the requirements above, then we can see about extending range with fewer passengers on board by having bigger tanks.

Pressurization and Doors:

The airplane must be pressurized to an 8,000 ft cabin at 25,000 ft ISA.

THIS AIRPLANE WILL HAVE 2 DOORS, ONE ON EACH SIDE, PERFECTLY SYMMETRICAL, LIKE CIRRUS SR-22 (Though the doors will surely be SMALLER). THIS DESIGN IS NOT SUBJECT TO DESIGN-STUDIES OR TRADE-OFFS, BUT IS A REQUIREMENT OF THE DESIGN. FAILURE TO MEET THIS DESIGN WILL MEAN STOPPAGE OF THE PROJECT, AS THIS IS A REQUIREMENT FOR ME TO WANT TO BUILD THE AIRPLANE. The plane must have 2 symmetrical doors, somewhat similar in layout, size, and opening hinge-line to a Cirrus SR-22. (The SR-22 has a door that CAN SAFELY come unlatched in flight (UNlike a Cessna-400!!!!) because it is hinged to open FORWARDS. Opening the door in flight simply trails it open 1 inch. If a Cessna-400 door opens in flight, it will open fully, depart the plane, wrap around the body in the propwash, strike the horizontal stab on the other side of the plane, and put a helical crack around the aft fuselage of the plane... or so a severely IQ-Challenged customer found out when he opened his door in flight.

The requirement is that if it is physically POSSIBLE to unlatch the doors in flight, that the doors be able to unlatch in flight without catastrophic damage. Being able to close the doors again is NOT a requirement.

Having NO damage is NOT a requirement.

Being able to physically open the doors is NOT a requirement.

The only requirement is that IF it is PHYSCIALLY POSSIBLE to open the door in flight, then doing so does not make the airplane unsafe for flight. This would imply a hinge-line like an SR-22: A door that opens somewhat-FORWARDS.

At some point during the life of the airplane, someone will close the door on his seatbelt, take off, hear the seatbelt rattling, turn off the pressurization system, and open the door. This must not result in a fatal accident, but it is OK if it damages or destroys the door latching mechanism, and it is OK if the door cannot be closed again in flight. But the plane must be about as flyable as a Cirrus SR-22 or Cessna 172 or Piper Archer with the door trailing 1 inch open: Noisy but safe.

I am aware that there are some weight penalties associated with the dual-door requirement above, but they are non-negotiable. Failure to meet these requirements will mean that I do not think the airplane is safe enough to fly. Carbon fiber is EXCELLENT under tension, and pressurization loads are tension loads. Use this to our advantage to make the pressure-vessel light-weight, even with exactly 2doors in it. You don't have to worry about a baggage door... we don't need it. All 4 seats will be flip-forward, so we can reach over the back ones or flip them forwards to get to the 24" length behind the aft seats that can serve as baggage storage.

The pressurization should be controlled through the touch-screens of my EFIS if at all possible. I understand that the Lancair Legacy is doing it that way. If anyone knows what company is doing that please let me know.

Environmental:

I do not yet know if air conditioning is required. I will only know about this after talking to pressurization-experts.

I do not yet know how we will get heat. I will only know about this after talking to pressurization-experts.

De-Ice:

The plane will NOT have inflatable boots... I do not care for their appearance, maintenance, or airflow-disruption.

I do not yet know if it will have a weeping-wing.

I do not yet know if it will be heated by bleed-air.

Once I have talked to some experts about the:

cost of a custom weeping-wing install,

the cost of a custom bleed-air de-ice system,

the cost of a heated windshield,

I will see if we can do a de-ice system at all.

I think that inlet heat for the engine is considered standard, and pitot-heat is considered standard, so we will have those systems if feasible.

Landing Gear:

Gear will be retractable (I found in X-Plane that fixed gear would cost us about 22 knots in this airplane!!!)

I do not yet have the expertise to say how it will be actuated, but an electrical system surely seems preferable to me... the Diamond aircraft use that system, apparently.

I am not yet clear on the best backup-extension method, if any.

Landing gear should allow the landing weight to be the same as the gross weight as defined above. Max rated tire load must be at least 50% greater than the gross weight of the airplane. The Eclipse-500 weight 5995 pounds, the tires were rated for 6,000 pounds, and they blew up all the time.. no matter how good the landing! As well, they had to be frequently replaced... we worked out that math on tire replacement for the Eclipse-jet 500, and it was many, many dollars per landing in tire-replacement costs alone!

Oleo struts are expected here. Trailing-link struts are NOT needed. We need the systems to be light and strong... making every landing super-smooth, at the expense of weight, is not enough of a requirement, I think, to add the weight of trailing-link gear.

Flaps:

Flaps will be setable to cruise, take-off, approach, and landing.

I do not yet have the expertise to say how they will be actuated, but an electrical system surely seems preferable to me... everybody else does it that way.

Fuel System:

I am looking for 4 tanks, 2 per wing, with a fuel selector that can draw from left inner tank, right inner tank, or (unless there is a good reason not to) both inner tanks.

The outer tanks should auto-drain into the inner tanks by gravity.

The inner tanks should NOT flow to the outer tanks, thanks to a check-valve.

The inner tanks should hold about 65% of the fuel.

The outer tanks should hold about 35% of the fuel.

This should allow one to fill the inner tanks for shorter flights, and outer tanks only when they have far to go.

Control interface:

Dual connected side-sticks. (Cirrus SR-22-style half-yokes or Cessna-400-style true-sticks are both fine).

Dual rudder-pedals with brakes.

I will need to confirm all seating, control locations and geometries, including rudder-pedal angles and locations, and control-throws, in some sort of basic iron-bird before the prototype is built.

APU-External Power.

APU? You gotta be kidding! I am not even sure we will have air conditioning or de-ice or backup gear-extension!

External power? For sure! To sit there playing with the avionics for hours, or help start the engine on a weak battery. Make it a plug in the side of the airplane, where convenient. Preferably in view of the pilot, if possible.

External Lights:

They make cool LED lights for the wingtips that have nav and strobe lites in one package, with the aft portion of the streamlined fairing being white to serve as a tail-lite. It's called the AveoFlash LED. I would like one of these (or something equally good or better) on each wing. Taxi and landing lights should be LED, if possible, mounted wherever desired... on the nose-gear strut would be fine. If ty are LED and don't get hot or burn out, then it would be great if they turned on automatically when the gear extended, if nobody has a good reason for them not to.

Internal lights:

The various switches for lights and generators and flaps and such should be internally-lit, if possible, in a quality similar to the Cessna-400. This internal lighting should be controlled by a rheostat.

A single overhead dome-lite on a rheostat to supplement that should be OK, I think, unless someone has a reason to add more that I have not thought of. The instruments are all computer screens, so they need no external light.

Avionics:

I will provide the avionics in the form of touch-screens, pursuant to the avionics section of this web page. Expect 2 MFDs and maybe 3 touch-screen pads.

Right now, I expect to have physical flaps, gear, throttle, fuel selector, battery, generator, and master switches, start-run switch, circuit-breakers, and maybe a few other things I have not thought of yet, but otherwise everything will go through the avionics... including pressurization, if at all possible!

We will have dual-gps, dual-ils, and dual com antennae.

We will also have an ELT antenna, of course, and hopefully TCAS and XM-WEATHER antennae as well.

We will have plugs for 4 BOSE ANR headsets. (Unless for some reason that is not the best headset for the plane, as it seems to be for the recips).

We will have the antennae that send the aircraft data to satellite for remote black-box collection as well, as described at the bottom of the AVIONICS section of thise site.

Flight-Test Hardware, which is also Fleet-Tracking Hardware:

I just wrote the software to track the airplane during flight-test. This program is simply another tab in the production-management software I wrote. This program sniffs out the flight-test data from a server and displays it on-screen as the server collects the flight-test data DURING THE FLIGHT. As you can see, you can simply check boxes on the left to select what variables you want to look at during flight. Drag the jog-slider on the bottom to look at any part of the flight. Drag your mouse on-screen to drag through the flight. Hit the auto-scroll button to continuously update the data during flight, like an EEG. Move the mouse (and vertical white line) over any bit of the chart to observe exactly what is going on at that moment in the flight. Observe the exact date and time of the mouse in the black box, upper-center. Observe the exact values of the data (randomly created for now, until we get a real airplane to send it!!) on the left, showing the exact data under the vertical scan-line that you move with the mouse. This lets you see any data, at any time, for any flight, both graphically and numerically.

This data will be used both for the flight-test airplane to run flight-test, and INSTALLED IN EVERY AIRPLANE WE BUILD to track and store every flight that every plane flies. This will serve to notify the builder if any limit is exceeded, and to act as a remote black-box in the event of an accident. The airplane will transmit it's data to satellites in orbit as it flies, and the satellites will then send the flight data back down to Laminar Research for storage and presentation in the program shown below.

So, how will we send the data from the airplane, to satellites, and then back to the ground to be sniffed out by my flight-tracker?

Well, I will announce the company that I have selected for this part of the job soon, but here is what I can tell you now: They currently make wrist-watches that have GPS's in them, and those wrist-watches transmit their location to satellites, which then send their data back down to a central server so that every wearer of one of these wrist-watches can be tracked on a web page. The technology was intended to let parents track their children and children track their parents if they have Alzheimers! Again: This is a GPS transmitter that FITS IN A WRIST-WATCH and TRANSMITS YOUR LOCATION TO SATELLITES, WHICH SEND YOUR LOCATION BACK DOWN TO A CENTRAL SERVER ON EARTH THAT CAN TRACK ALL THE WRIST-WATCHES ON EARTH. We will simply have a specialized version of this watch made that will track our fuel flow, exhaust-gas temperature, true airspeed, etc etc etc, and is built into the avionics rather than worn on our wrist!!!

This wrist-watch-sized GPS and sat-com transmitter will go into every plane we build so that we have a file for every single flight of every single plane to act as a black-box... stored in a SAFE place, not at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or a smoking hole in the ground. (Which, when you think about it, is actually the WORST place to store the black box. I mean, CAN YOU THINK OF A WORSE PLACE TO STORE A BLACK BOX THAN THE MIDDLE OF AN AIRPLANE-ACCIDENT? CAN YOU THINK OF A WORSE PLACE TO STORE A BLACK BOX?!?!?!) So the X-1 will send it's in-flight data to Laminar Research to act as a remote black-box. As always, I will be your humble guinea-pig... the FIRST plane will have this exact technology... simply being used for FLIGHT-TEST! The exact same software and hardware will be used for my flight-test and your every-day flying. EVERY flight will be taken as seriously as a flight-test.

So our cost and weight on this will be the same as a glorified wrist-watch.. with software that is zero-cost since I just decided to give up sleeping and eating for 8 hours to write it just now.

Now, how does this compare to the traditional flight-test? Well, this is the inside of the AMAZING Boeing 777 during flight-test: (granted, an extreme case, for sure.. these guys are geared for INTERNATIONAL flights DURING flight-test!)

Again: The hardware to transmit data during OUR flight-test will be about the SIZE OF A BULKY WRIST-WATCH! (Thoug we will have some Macintoshes on the ground displaying the flight-test data, using the software shown above)

As well, the data-tracking transmitter will indicate if it thinks the airplane has crashed (by looking at speed differentical over time, or looking to see if the dataream suddenly stopped with the last-received transmission being at more than 50 knots, for example, or by looking to see if you have manually hit the ELT button). If the airplane transmits any of the things just mentioned, then that will be percieved as a crash by Laminar Research, with appropriate response taken by us. In other words, we will ALWAYS be there watching your back in flight... but only bothering to pay attention if something goes WRONG.

Now for the interior styling:

This is the target I want to hit for look-and-feel. This would involve a raw carbon-fiber body with excellent seats and avionics on a raw carbon-fiber or aluminum dash.

Seats:

Below, we see a layout of how I hope to use off-the-shelf racing seats for sexy look, low cost, low weight, and excellent crash-worthiness.

All seats will be of the 'flip-forward' type to allow access to the back seats from the 2 entry doors, and access to the baggage bay from the back seats.

These seats lack vertical crash absorption, so they will sit on a FLOOR PANEL that crushes down in an accident.For this reason, the wing spar must not pass under a seat.

OK a few measurements from a Ferrari 430:

Ferrari seats are 21" wide
We want a 52" total width in the cabin, I think.
We want 40" from the floor to the ceiling over each individual's head.
We want 36" from the lowest point in the seat-bottom cusion to the ceiling over each individual's head.

So, for the interior, we ask: What is the lowest-drag, lowest-weight shape for a carbon-fiber pressure-vessel that is 52" wide at the shoulder and elbow, gives 40" from the floor to the cieling over ech person's head, and 36" from the seat bottom to the cieling voer each person's head?

I might not have a perfect answer here, because I do not think there is room for the seat-bottom base here, but here is a starting-point:

(10 pix1 inch, so you can use this to measure anything):