AM-69 Georges Payre
The AM-69 Georges Payre, also known as the Arts & Métiers AM-69 and the ENAM-69/70, was a conventionally laid out low wing monoplane designed and built by French students in the early 1970s. It was intended as a trainer, seating two in tandem.
Design and development
Design of the AM-69 began in 1969 as the name suggests, when a group of twelve students of the school started from the incomplete design of the Gaucher TRG-662, a tandem seat light aircraft. The AM machine was to be a two-seat training aircraft and the design work occupied the students for some 3,000 hours. Its construction, undertaken by another group of ten students took 4,000 hours, with the AM-69 flying on 6 May 1973. It was named after one of their lecturers.The prototype AM-69 was an all-wood, low wing cantilever monoplane. Its wings, skinned with birch plywood had a modified Mureau 234 section with a maximum thickness-to-chord ratio of 13.2%, notable for the large area of both upper and lower surfaces which were flat. There was dihedral over the whole wing and a full-span combination of inboard flaps and ailerons.
The Georges Payre was powered by a 67 kW Continental C90 air-cooled flat four engine in the nose of its rectangular section, round decked fuselage. Fuel tanks were in the wings. The occupants sat in tandem under a long, framed canopy with individual, starboard-hinged sections for access. Solo control was from the forward seat, over the wing. The conventional cantilever tail had swept, straight-edged vertical surfaces, with a rudder that extended to the keel and horizontal surfaces mounted at mid-fuselage height forward of the rudder hinge. The control surfaces were horn balanced and there was a large trim tab on the port elevator.
The AM-69's fixed, conventional undercarriage borrowed heavily from other designs. The main legs and wheels, mounted onto the front wing spar, were from a Robin DR.220 and the tailwheel was a modified Stampe SV.4 component.
The ENAM students began the design of an all-metal version, with larger tail surfaces and revised canopy and engine cowling, intending it to be homebuilt from plans but nothing seems to have come of this.