Of all the complaints I got from people who test-flew this aircraft for me, the most common was "it is too fast." I'm like... whoa. I gave it WAAAY too much horsepower. After taming it down a bit... it is STILL fast.
The aircraft was thought up when my girlfriend, heavily annoyed with my fixation with aircraft, wanted me to make her a plane. So I did. I had never experimented with propeller aircraft, always sticking to the blissful ease of jet and rocket propulsion (HP... RPM?? What the hell???) and I had just read a bunch of stuff on Scaled Composite's "Pond Racer," which featured a triple hulled design with turboprops and forward swept wings. I have a bad taste in my mouth about forward swept wings, as X-Plane makes them extremely difficult, so I dropped the wings, added a counter-rotating four-engined layout, and made it a 6 person corporate aircraft, an alternative to a Lear Gulfstream. You don't have to forfeit speed if you want this bird... its just about as fast as a biz jet. And you get something special: STOL. This thing has mad short take off skills. I mean, almost VTOL.
About ten feet later (not exaggerating) the aircraft is airborne. This makes short field performance great, and allows it a greater range of airports it can take off from, for instance, I know it would have no trouble taking off and landing from my local small field, Reid Hillview, while a Lear 20 might sweat the landing roll.
Also, the aircraft's variable pitch propeller allows for superior high-altitude performance, as this picture illustrates. It has fantastic range at 30,000 feet. Also, I've been able to fly it fine, even take it off, with only two of the four engines. This is great if you want to save fuel, maybe loiter in an area.
The aircraft's awesome performance and docile handling has encouraged me to make some military variants of it, mainly in electronics gathering (maybe a supplement or replacement to the now-famous EP-3C Orion) or light-cargo. It has made a wonderful tribute to my beloved and long-time girlfriend, Erin, whose patience with my aircraft obsession has been a blessing.
Remember, bypass any Download Accelerator before trying to get this aircraft, 50megs is screwy like that.
