[tim333]

It's also where the tail is compared to the main wheels. When you want to take off the pilot moves the elevator on the tail which pushes the tail down causing the nose to lift up pivoting on the rear wheels. If you look at a pic of a normal plane https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Cessna.f... you don't have to push down too hard on the tail to lift the nose.

In the Indian guys design the tail is closer to the wheels and the engine sticks out a lot in front so you'd need a lot of force https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/14A54/producti...

It might still take off but you'd need to be quite fast to get enough downforce on the tail. I wonder if they'll get to try.

There's video of him driving it quite fast down the runway: https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8?t=27s

[cpncrunch]

Have you ever seen a 150 in real life? There's nothing in the tailcone. If you had a battery and some avionics boxes in there, the you could probably move the tail a few feet towards the front to achieve the same moment.

You simply can't guess the balance from a picture.

[tim333]

I learnt to fly in a 150. Yeah you can't tell exactly where the balance is from a picture and it depends where you've put the luggage and so on.

Edit: Pausing the video at 32s it seems he's pulled back on the stick and managed to lift the front wheel a few inches https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8

[topspin]

He fully deflected the elevator and bounced the nose gear. With zero passengers. You put 6 adults and a co-pilot forward of the rear gear and I bet even bouncing will be out of the question. But we don't know if the ground speed was even representative of take off, so we're all just guessing here. With regard to cooling you can see an evolution here in the BBC photos: the first two images show no cooling ducts on either side of the TAC-003 engine compartment, but later images show several. I think geff82 is probably spot on about the design.