The Beck-Mahoney Sorceress is a racing staggerwing biplane originally designed by the father and son team of Lee and Seldon Mahoney with later improvements accomplished by pilot Don Beck. The aircraft is notable as being the first biplane to exceed 200 mph (320 km/h) on a race pylon course and also held the distinction of being the most successful racing biplane in history, until Tom Aberle's Phantom, which has won eight Reno Gold championships since its introduction in 2004. It was donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum after its last race, where it is currently housed in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. A reverse-stagger biplane, Sorceress represents the state of the art at the time of its design and remains one of the great design classics of air-racing within the United States. Lee Mahoney, the designer, had experience in airframe construction with composite materials, metal-to-composite bonding technologies, and computational fluid dynamics, applying his experience to design Sorceress, and achieve success with several noteworthy design features, including: Use of engine exhaust air flow forms a Coandă effect-bonded laminar flow over the fuselage, increasing rudder efficiency by several orders of magnitude. Mahoney had originally designed the fuselage so that a fin would not be necessary - the fuselage would have ended with a rudder, but his partners however preferred a more conventional treatment, giving Sorceress one of the smallest conventional fins of any racing biplane to date. The aerofoil sections of the wings are designed as mirror image 'vanes' of symmetrical section - they interfere with each other's flow in a manner which provides very high efficiency in turns, whereas one vane-set/wing begins to lose efficiency, the other gains more, allowing for extremely high lift in turns with minimal loss of velocity Sorceress gains a great deal from composite bonding, with one of the first airframes to demonstrate almost perfect streamlining combined with very great strength; the wing interplane struts are for show only, Sorceress being capable of flight without them, but racing rules require them. For details of results and records. click here.
