RUTAN "DEFIANT" - Plane + Pilot

RUTAN “DEFIANT”

Plane & Pilot

Friday, April 16, 2010 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By: Omar Filipović

Key Takeaways:

The Rutan Defiant is a four-seat, twin-engine proof-of-concept aircraft, an offshoot of other Rutan canard designs, which was initially intended for eventual mass production.
It features a canard foreplane, rear-mounted swept wings with winglets, a unique tractor and pusher twin-engine configuration, and was designed for simplicity with no flaps and fixed-pitch propellers.
The aircraft offers impressive performance, including a cruise speed of 210 mph and a range of 1,128 miles, with its designers notably claiming it had no minimum controllable airspeed.

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The Rutan Defiant is a four-seat twin-engine proofof-concept offshoot of the other Rutan canard designs. The Defiant was intended for eventual mass production. It made use of the VariEze rear-mounted swept cantilever wings with winglet surfaces, canard foreplane, and a retractable nose wheel with a fixed main landing gear. The two engines were mounted in tractor and pusher positions feeding off a 45-gallon tank for each. The Defiant was intended to be a simple aircraft with no flaps, fixed-pitch propellers, and few complex systems. Its designers claimed that the Defiant had no minimum controllable airspeed.