Seeking information and advice for the D5 Turbi

Hi, Daniel.

I share your fondness for the Turbi, essentially a scaled up version of Roger Druine's wonderful little Turbulent.  By the way, the name is a play on words as two-seaters are called "biplace" in French, so it is the Tur(bulent) bi(place).

I would point out that you would be tackling what is essentially an antique homebuilt replica as the design is over 50 years old and no longer supported.  Shop space may be an issue as I suspect that, like the Turbulent, the Turbi uses a one-piece wing spar, tip to tip.  I don't know anything about the Falconar version or the support that they might offer, but if you wanted to go with the single-seat Turbulent I believe that an updated and strengthened version is available from Australia.

Still, I have seen Turbis flying in France and the UK, so there are still a few people out there who could help.  If you need help with French-English translation, let me know.

Cheers,

Matthew

Thanks Matthew,

I bit the bullet and sent away for the information pack.  Hopefully that will answer some questions about what has been updated.  I am hoping as with some of the other designs they have added hinged wings.

I might have let it go, except everyone who has ever flown one seems to be in love with it.  Not fast, not aerobatic, just the perfect fly arround the patch (and to Oshkosh) ride for a relatively new pilot and a freind.  My backup right now is to look at one of the Fisher biplanes. 

I just seem to have an unnatural attraction for open cockpits and classic lines.  Might explain why my favorite RC plane was a Ryan STA.

If the plans are still in French, I might have to take you up on your translation help.  I am not sure my daughter's French English dictionary covers aeronautical terms.

Cheers

Daniel

By the way, the British civil register still shows three Turbis active, though all three were originally build between 1956 and 1960.  For those that don't know the Turbulent adn Turbi, both designs feature fixed slots in the wings forward of the ailerons to provide docile low-speed handling.  See the Tiger Club Turbulent Team page for great pics of low-and-slow formation flying with four Turbulents.

I believe the plans are in the metric system, so you'd better lay in some tape measures, squares, etc. in centimeters/meters.

There's a story around our EAA chapter that a local group tried to build a Turbulent in the '60s.  They split the tasks among sub-groups, and one of them did the conversions to English units wrong.  The parts didn't fit....

Things can happen...remember that NASA probe that went SPLAT?