> And note that the Avanti has most of the fuselage on front of the wing and
> not much aft of it. So, a lot of structure and stuff in the front. I would
> assume that things like batteries are located closer to the nose.
One thing that makes the Avanti very unique is that it's not really a
canard up front as it is does not contain any control surfaces. It is
strictly a lifting surface equipped with flaps that deploy along with
the flaps on the main wing. So there are two lifting surfaces (plus
the fuselage itself) carrying the load. The tail, although claimed to
be another lifting surface, really isn't. The main wing is located
quite a bit behind the center of gravity. As is true with a Rutan
canard design, the forward wing has a higher stall speed than the main
wing. The main wing also contains a lot of aero tricks to control the
stall. Other than horrid noise of the props chopping their way through
the exhaust gases, I really like the Avanti.
As a flight-simmer, I've got it loaded up on my computer and have
customized the flight characteristics a bit to better match the real
world profile a bit better. It's actually not the best flying aircraft
in its class, and the landing speeds are higher than comparable
turboprops, but slower than comparable jets.
The biggest real-world disadvantage of the Avanti is the rather tight
flight duration profile. You just can't go very far with it. It really
needs to have more fuel capacity, but they had to keep it below the
12,000 pound gross weight limit.
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