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Do wings on a plane need to be in the same plane horizontally, or can one wing root be 6" lower than the other?

The proposed application would be for a ultralight with high mount folding wings, where first 50% chord flaps would fold down 180 deg underneath the wings, reducing the "folded chord" to 50% of the full wing chord. Then the tapered wings would scissor back about 120 deg over the fuselage and interlock like a scissor, so when the wings are folded up, they are roughly mirror the same shape as the fuselage. One wing root would be about 6" higher than the other.

For example, with a 12" high spar root, and 3" thick wings, one 1/2 span would be mounted near the top of the spar, the other one, at the bottom on the other side of the fuselage

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  • $\begingroup$ "50% flaps" means that the flaps' "width" is half of the wing chord, not that the pilot has commanded the flaps to be deflected halfway, right? $\endgroup$
    – Camille Goudeseune
    Oct 8, 2019 at 21:47

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The left and right wing may be at different heights. You'd suffer from interference drag at the joint between them, or extra induced drag from the two extra "wingtips" if there is no joint, but a slow ultralight can tolerate such drag better than most airplanes. This may be the only asymmetrical design that Rutan didn't attempt.

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