Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Metamorphic Wings: The Future of Flight is Here" video.

Go look at the sailing videos, they have always had some form of morphing its just gotten a lot better in recent decades. That's what many of the adjustments to the mast & boom have been for. They are actually changing the shape of the airfoil. I am an aerospace engineer and some of the stuff being done on the America's cup boats is seriously impressive.
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@ZirothTech Here's something even weirder about a competition aerobatic plane. The propellers have quite fat blades which at first seems unusual for a high performance aircraft. because they are limited in diameter they need more blade to do what's needed. The other thing is that on vertical down lines you also need braking as in like putting your foot on the middle pedal in a car. For instance a competition spin you have to complete the vertical line AFTER the spin. It goes almost against normal human behavior that after recovering a spin you then point the plane vertically at the ground. When you're doing this you aren't looking at the ground either you're looking at the wing tip gauge because for every 5deg you are off the vertical the judged deduct a point. So you push into a perfect vertical dive and at that point you WANT DRAG not thrust. So at low engine power the constant speed prop goes flat and acts like a bag fat air brake. When flying straight at the ground you don't want the prop puling you want it creating as much drag as possible. I once had a pilot tell me "You haven't experienced prop drag until you've flow a Yak." He then described how in his old plane that in a vertical down when he'd pull the engine back he'd fall forward into the harness. Competition aerobatics is this weird set of trade-offs and until you get into it there's just stuff you'll never know. Look under the wings for the small winglets that are attached to the ailerons. Look at the ailerons near the wingtips. Several planes have the last part of the wingtip well ahead of the pivot point, just like many rudders have part of the rudder ahead of the pivot point. Its not that different to other forms of competition inspired engineering. I had a boss who was into the top level of Australian open wheel racing. At the time all the cars were ex-F3000 from Europe with a locally sourced engine. Scott Dixon the Indy Car racer was in a rival team to my bosses team back then. There's stuff about those cars and how they drivers drove them that 20 years later still amazes me.
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Sorry buddy but on the aerobatics planes you are totally wrong on several points. Your a pretty smart kid and you do some great videos but occasionally get stuff 100% wrong. You really need to occasionally go and ask people about these things. I am an aerospace engineer with a pilots license and have flown competition aerobatics. Planes like the Extra 300/330, Yaks, Edeg450 and others mostly use a symmetrical wing sections so they have the same characteristics inverted as well as upright. That's needed for things like inverted spins and negative flick rolls. Learning to fly for me was incredibly humbling because I had to start listening a lot more to a lot of people. I've become more used to ordering electricians and junior engineers about, which happens after 30+ years. It became even more so when I took up aerobatics. Suddenly I was the student with a head full of nothing. Power to weight ratio and stability (YES STABILITY) are more important than anything else. The power thing is fairly obvious but ALL of the current aerobatics planes are very stable in flight unlike planes like the Pitts which are super manoeuvrable but also very twitchy. Its maybe the thing I find so technically impressive about those planes. They not only have incredible response to inputs but also high levels of stability. They stay where they are pointed. Scoring in aerobatics is about how clean you fly the manoeuvres NOT how many Gs are pulled or how fast you roll or how clean your aerodynamics are. The scoring system is quite similar to gymnastics and diving. Judges don't score according to how hard a figure is they score out of 10 (with 1/2 marks) for how well its flown subtracting points (& 1/2 points) for mistakes. Its about how round a loop is or how straight a line is flown. The difficulty of a figure is covered by a degree of difficulty that we call the "k-factor" which is based on summing up the various parts of a figure. The area of competition flying where this stuff is most likely to find a home is in gliding. if you want to ever go and see where the future of high efficiency aerodynamics is headed then go watch some of the gliding channels here on YT.
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