Tractor side by side, with floats, drawing

[ricardoramalho]

Please my friends, check this rough drawing I did.
The floats are small as possible, so the tail touches the water when landed.
The front floats are the shape of well curved bananas to waterplane on water in many angles. The rotor mast is almost between the crew, but I would probably need to put it in front of the crew (with a side by side view it would not be too bad to pilot behind the mast). What do you think?:yo:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_PcKSya5DxW0/TRiiKzlc-mI/AAAAAAAAAW0/p2pQeY8gh4A/s512/gyrodrawing1net.jpg

[Alan_Cheatham]

Any part of the main floats that extends ahead of the center of gravity will de-stabilize the aircraft in-flight and must be counter balanced aerodynamically by some surface. Typically this is done with the portion of the floats that is aft of the C.G. and usually some additional vertical surfaces added to the tail, without the aft portions of the floats as in your design all the aerodynamic compensation will need to come from the empennage.

Very similar in concept to early float aircraft, an interesting idea if you can work out all the stability problems.

.

[kolibri282]

Since the center of gravity of the aircraft is always nearly vertically below the rotor hub the center of buoyancy of the floats must also be nearly vertically below the rotor hub. Any deviation will lead to a trim angle you might not want. This in fact is the smaller problem the really hard one is stability in flight as Alan has pointed out. The forces and moments generated by the floats will vary quite markedly with angle of attack and the range of possible angles of attack is much greater for a gyro than for a fixed wing aircraft