Ze Plane! Ze Plane!

[ceptimus]

I posted in the 'make something every week' thread that I'd purchased and made ready this little radio control gyrocopter.



Anyway, I'm pleased to report that it flies great. The trick is to only use about half power on the take-off run, so that the rotor has time to be spun up to speed by the airflow before taking off - if you use full power, then it leaps into the air before the rotor is up to speed - and that makes a crash very likely.

It flies like a cross between a model plane and model helicopter - which is to be expected, I suppose, given how it looks. I only had one battery available of the correct size to fit this model, but I've ordered another two batteries now, so I can enjoy flying it more often without having to recharge the battery at the flying field.

Oh, and that Elf glider I mentioned in my last post in this thread is excellent. I must have thrown it about a thousand times already. Most flights last about twenty or thirty seconds, but my longest flight was over fifteen minutes! It's best in calm conditions so that when you do catch a thermal and circle upwards, the glider doesn't drift away downwind to the point where you have to abandon the lift because you can't see the glider clearly anymore.

[godfry n. glad]

Okay...Those Dornier boys are at it again.

I seriously WANT. I can't have, but I still want.



http://www.dornierseaplane.com/files...chure_1509.pdf

I understand they are building in Quebec. I can't imagine why.

[BrotherMan]

[curses]

I love that shoop. It always makes me giggle.

[Dingfod]

Face swap.

[ceptimus]

Here's a real plane with two fuselages.



It was built for an electric plane competition a couple of years ago. The right fuselage has room for two people, and the left one is full of batteries. But in principle the batteries could be distributed differently making room for at least one person to sit in each side.

Electric Airplane Has 4 Seats, Two Fuselages, One Big Motor | Autopia | Wired.com

[godfry n. glad]

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Act NOW!

[Dingfod]

Only $2.2 million? Where's my checkbook?

[godfry n. glad]

Get your butt in a sling....uh, wing.

I'll bet if you dicker, you could get it down under $2 million.

[ceptimus]

Team AeroVelo have won the Sikorsky prize for a human powered helicopter flight. To win the prize the flight had to:

1. Exceed a height of three meters briefly
2. Remain airborn for one minute
3. Stay within a ten meter by ten meter area over the ground

The configuration is what we model flyers call a 'quadrotor' - one of many possible configurations of 'multirotors'. One diagonal pair of rotors rotate clockwise and the other pair counter clockwise. Normally, pitch and roll control is achieved by increasing the lift from one rotor of a pair while decreasing the lift of its partner; yaw control is by feeding more power to either the clockwise or anticlockwise pair so that the torque reaction rotates the craft - however, I'm not sure whether the human powered machine used this control method - I don't know if had any controls at all.

More details on the winning team and their machine here.

[Dingfod]

Texas company selling Supermarine Spitfire replicas in kit form for $175,000.

Originally Posted by Mike O'Sullivan of Supermarine Aircraft Co.

It's like a Porsche in the sky.

I can tell from them standing in front of the airplane, it's way smaller than the original.

[godfry n. glad]

Okay...I sprung for a weekend of ground school at a local restoration outfit that kind of specializes in Douglas DC-3/C-47/Dakotas. So, it's a Gooney School. A full weekend in September. In Aurora, close by in the Valley. The outfit is Aerometal International. They tell me they have three working Dakotas sitting around their shop at this point. Looking at their gallery, I can believe it. One is being finished for a projected flight back to Down Ampney in England, where it served in WWII as a cargo, troop-carrier, and glider-tug including Operation Market Garden. It is scheduled to depart for England in October, so I'm assuming they are doing finishing touches at this point. Evidently the classes are held under one of the Goonies.

I'm looking forward to it. Volunteer positions have been discussed. We all know what I'd want out of that.....

[godfry n. glad]

So, the ground school got pushed out to November. I decided to drop by the outfit and check out their supply of Dakotas...



They got'em. Three of them, actually. Two are functional. The Eastern Airlines livery is a privately owned item awaiting interior work. The one beyond it is another private craft being fitted with a new a aileron on the port wing. The Down Ampney project craft is now in pieces, awaiting a fund-raising effort. We were allowed to wander all around and even enter the Dakotas, the only limitation being to stay on the runners in the one being worked on.

[ceptimus]

Niagara Falls videoed by a model quadcopter.

[Dingfod]

Mythbusters Season 4 Episode 24: Concrete gliders. With a glide ratio of 6:1, not that great, but one of them did in fact glide.

Not this one, it's glide ratio was about 1:1...

[godfry n. glad]

So I did the 'Ground School' wherein I spent two days imagining what a 'transitional' pilot would go through in training for flying the C-47/C-54 Skytrain...the basic military DC-3. We were provided a training handbook and pilot's handbook as class reference and taken through the ground portion of a ten-week training class, as provided to USAAC cadets in 1943 in two days. There were, of course, the three actual planes, two which are operational.

The fellow who led this event is a native Brit from the Cotswold country who has spent probably the better part of his adult life (I'd say he's in his early 40s) flying and fixing DC-3 craft. He has a decent collection of navigation logs, training manuals, and repair manuals. He has his company, Aerometal International, which manufactures steel tire chocks...and, does specialty restorations on vintage craft. He has a shop and a hangar at a smallish airport in a exurban community of Puddle City. He has a modeling problem, but his problem is the scale he works in...1:1.

The class was fun for me, but I'm not a gearhead, I'm merely a fanboy. But time spent near, and clambering around, these grand old craft so lovingly restored....it was worth the entrance fee. They are privately owned DC-3 passenger craft. Our host does not own them...he restores them.

I got some better pix this time:


The classroom.



The Edith Mae, in the foreground, is having some engine work done.





This is the most refurbished of the three DC-3 sitting around the hangar.




The passenger entry.


The head was immediately to the right.


The cabin to the left.


A look back from the flight deck.


Behind the flight deck.


The flight deck.


The view and the instrument panels.



The other is a movie star.







It too, is private and the owner is currently trying to decide how he wants the interior redone. The flight deck is completed, but other than that, there are only a few chairs to play with configurations....







Behind the pilot's seat.


The flight deck.



Then...there's the most recent arrival, over next to the hangar wall...




Wings are off.


It was flown to the hangar location and then disassembled.



Still, it has been neglected for some time...it had become a ramp tramp.







This IS the Down Ampney Project....

Boy, I sure wish I had 25 grand to spare...I'd pitch in 10% on getting this thing back to Down Ampney, particularly if it would get me a ride along on the return voyage.

Well, that's how I spent my weekend.

[Dingfod]

First class:

http://s269.photobucket.com/user/wel...0b545.jpg.html

Coach:

http://s269.photobucket.com/user/wel...1dc68.jpg.html

[godfry n. glad]

Heh...

Well, the one you've designated at 'coach' is in the process of having the interior redone. The owner has not decided on how to configure and is sorting through the means of incorporating bunks into the cabin...the owner's goal, as it was related to me, is to outfit the rig so that he can fly ten friends around the world.



The last one doesn't have the web seating installed yet, but the disembarkation procedure is...abrupt.

[godfry n. glad]

Okay...Just before the end of the year, we made a dash to Seattle ('where the sun don't shine') for gramma fix and I got dumped at Boeing Field at the Museum of Flight facilities to obtain some pix. These are those pix:

The Great Gallery -

















In the Personal Courage Wing, there was an upper floor gallery of WWI aircraft and the lower floor galleryof selected WWII aircraft...a few -


The Jug.


Yakovlev Yak-9


Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk in Flying Tigers Nationalist China livery.

Over in the outdoor Air Park -


Yeah...Connie. Lockheed Super Constellation L-1049 in Trans-Canada Airways livery. Niiiiiice.






British Air Concorde.


The plane that kicked the commerical crap outta Boeing's 'visionary' Boeing 247 airliner...the Douglas DC-2.

There was lots more that I didn't get pix of...I wasn't in top shape that day.

[godfry n. glad]

For Ding:

AeroMobil: Flying car

[godfry n. glad]

Along those same lines, Ding...

Promises, promises.

[SR71]

E-Fan electric aircraft makes first public flight

Battery powered ducted E-Fan. Flies for an hour with a person in it.

[Dingfod]

Is a ducted fan more efficient than a propeller?

The plane itself looks like the Beede BD-series planes.

[SR71]

Originally Posted by Dingfod

Is a ducted fan more efficient than a propeller

On my little models fans are only about half as efficient as props and not necessarily any faster, either. I'm not sure what happens as scale increases, though. It did say they have variable pitch blades on that thing, which must at least help with efficiency.

The plane itself looks like the Beede BD-series planes.

I thought the same thing!

[Dingfod]

A BD-5 for reference purposes: