You are listening to the Flight Test Podcast, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us. I'm James

Wormsley and today what we're doing is talking to Josh Bixler about aerodynamics.

So it's just you, me and Josh and we're going to just sort of hang out. So let's jump right in.

So we may as well just start this off by sort of saying hello and introducing ourselves. So

I'm joined by the main man, Josh Bixler. So how are you doing, Josh?

Hi, guys.

I'm doing good, brother.

It's great to talk to you again. And I prefer the title head janitor. Janitor. I think a bit more than that. A bit more than that. It's great to catch up with you. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so I thought it would be a nice idea to sort of just hang out again.

You, me and the listeners, to talk about aerodynamics today.

So, yeah, basically this episode is all about sort of practical hands-on aerodynamics.

So just really what you should be thinking about when you're designing your own aircraft,

your own phone board aircraft. So yeah, let's have a bit of discussion about that.

Cool. So yeah, maybe first of all, I should ask for you, Josh, like what exactly is your sort of process for designing a new plane? Do you sort of just start off with a drawing or how do you how do you

about things? I got to give my dad major props for this. He was so patient when I was a kid because

I would take the most crazy weird concepts of flight to him and he would give me a lot of encouragement

and guidelines. One thing I really start off with, especially in the model world, is lift doesn't scale up or down proportionately.

Generally, when you get bigger, things get easier, and when you get smaller, things get more touchy.

So what he taught me at a really young age is to really focus in on the control surfaces and mainly the elevator and rudder and the wing surfaces.

When you are building a mediocre sized airplane, you don't just take a scale drawing and shrink it down.

Things change proportionally.

So what I always look at is the control surfaces of the airplane, mainly the tail, and oftentimes the very first thing I do is exaggerate them a little bit to make it

behave as it should as a bigger model.

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