I thought it was going to be named after "Porco Rosso" (<a href="http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=855" rel="nofollow">http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=85...</a>), to be honest. Talking about "Porco Rosso", I got to briefly visit Trieste for the first time ever this summer, Miyazaki and his fellow animators really did a very good job of portraying everything about the city, from the beautiful light to the Austro-Hungarian buildings from downtown. I had only seen the movie once, about 10 years ago, but I had a strong deja-vu feeling as I was visiting the Trieste waterfront, from where the first ever commercial Italian airplane took off in the early '20s.
And it does look like the anime version: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zhLBe319KE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zhLBe319KE</a><p>About 35 seconds in.
Looks like this has been an ongoing project for a while.<p><a href="http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/08/06/real-life-nausiccas-mowe-glider-makes-first-powered-flight/" rel="nofollow">http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/08/06/real-life-nausiccas-mo...</a>
That design, while interesting and reminiscent of all the flying wing experiments and developments over the years, scares the ever loving hell out of me. I say this as a person working on a personal wing device also without a large vertical stabilizer control surface. Brave soul, and I fully applaud giving it a try!
Pretty amazing. I'm worried about the positive feedback in the controls though... shift weight back to pitch up, which is going to cause more weight to shift back. Definitely a stall hazard, and a tough one to get out of.
<i>"if i move up the front, the nose goes down because the weight is on the nose. if i slide down the nose goes up because the weight is on the tail. to make a turn, if i tilt my body this way the force is on the side"</i><p>yaikes, this thing seems to be all manual based on weight disposition! Makes it quite a bit more challenging in my opinion.