We now ask ourselves how far the tailplane need be from the mainplane, a question we've been asking ourselves since the Wright Brothers first moved on from mending punctured inner-tubes.
At times like this I like to go broad-brush or big picture and bear in mind the Skunk Works dictum of it looking right and flying right: I've therefore taken a punt on making the intervening gap the same as the width of each plane viz. 450mm or around 18".
I've always wanted the mainplane to be around the mid-point, and in fact it's one of the easier tick-offs on my before-I-die bucket list. It means that the overall length is going to be around 1.50 metres or five feet, which has a 'golden mean' feel to it and is a proportion I feel that Michelangelo would have aimed at with his own maritime drone.
It also means that ~ all being well ~ it should fit the bath-tub earmarked to become one of the largest hydrostatic test facilities in the North of England and which ~ due the UK government's refusal to finance it ~ lies abandoned in the garage.
Nonetheless if we look at the outline of the world's most successful airliner in the shape of the Airbus 320 ~ one or other variant of which I spent over seven thousand hours of my life in ~ we'll see we're not too far adrift from conventional methodology... the larger A321 pitches the mainplane more centrally again.
