Category: Uncategorized

The Phantom streamer nicker of old Tanworth Lane

Adding a streamer onto the tail of your plane can be loads of fun, so I thought it would be the perfect time to test my new Mobius camera.

Now I’d heard a rumour about a pilot called “The Phantom streamer nicker of old Tanworth Lane” so I attached a small streamer to try and lure him out.

Sit back, switch to big screen and put the playback settings on 1080HD, enjoy 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLnJQE41Xn8

Could have sworn I saw something buzzing around then, maybe a bigger streamer would help 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaUovKLGmgg

So let these videos be a cautionary tale to anyone who flys with a streamer, he is out there somewhere,

watching…

waiting…

will your streamer be next?

 

 

Almost an Automatic Ban (How High, How Far, How Fast 2)

As we all know being caught over 100mph is an automatic ban. Fortunately whilst speed testing Scott’s newly decorated Viggen EDF we clocked a top speed of 96 mph. A technical issue with the launch mechanism which caused damage to the nose, and shifting of the battery possibly over the GPS unit so it didn’t detect correct meant that although we think this speed was beaten it was not correctly measured.

The first run had an on board camera, and here is the GPS track

speed1

 

And the onboard for run 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruRFUOC4Anw

Below is the speed vs altitude for each of the runs, as you can see run 4 does not appear to show correct data.

 

SpeedVsAlt

Adding onto this I did do some further calculations based on the longitude and latitude registered on the device, although the speed was not logged, the position appears to have been. Below is the graph which show this calculation appears to be very close to the measured speed, although the calculated speed does not take account of vertical speed, only horizontal speed.

CalculatedSpeed

This show a top speed of 126 MPH! Although of course if the speed isn’t being logged correctly, the altitude does look like it is not being logged correctly here, so the position is also not confirmable. But as an unofficial top speed 126mph isn’t bad!

 

Updated:

Based on the same calculation of distance moved between each recorded point, the points are always 1 second apart, so the distance travelled can be calculated and so then of course the speed

otherruns

EDF wings

I’ve had and been given a few ideas on how to combine a wing and EDF unit, most of which I couldn’t wait to try,

then a friend showed me what they had done. Basically just laminating some depron and cutting out a hole to house

the EDF unit.

Well I couldn’t resist giving it a try, and after a brief discussion with Chris we decided to give it a go, and this was the outcome…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-udJdoJkC4A&feature=youtu.be

How High? How Far? How Fast?

Something I think we all wonder is how high our plane goes, how fast they go, and its rather difficult to know exactly how far away it gets when its up in the air.

I purchased a GPS tracker (well 2 and lost the first one) to get a better idea of these three questions. Today I put the GPS tracker in a glider and a camera on it. Of course gliders tend to be flown at altitude so I didn’t think a ground video would be much use.

So lets start with the flight. This was made from a glider, I’m not great with a glider anyway, and they say a bad workman blames his tools, fortunately I know I’m a bad workman. So this is how not to do gliding. I definitely had trouble with this glider under power it seems to roll and pitch quite violently and I have a lot of issues correcting this as you will tell from this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABFsLl16G1o

So onto the questions, the first question is how high:

elevation1

This is the elevation track of the flight against the distance traveled over ground. The ground level is showing as 340ft and the maximum altitude of 1204ft (at approx 84 seconds into the flight) at this altitude I was now having problems seeing the orientation of the glider, and particularly since I find the glider rather unstable under power I decided it best to stop at this height. So this makes the maximum altitude 864ft above the ground.

This leads onto the how far. As you can see the total flight distance is 2.1 miles in a total flight time of 355 seconds (just under 6 minutes). The actual how far away it goes can be seen on this track of the flight.

glider2track

Although I didn’t try to fly very far away the track shows that the perception of the distance away when flying you think that your plane is far further away than it actually is. I expected to be more than the next field away, this shows that I barely made it out of our field.

The final question was how fast. The top speed on this track was actually 48.5 mph, I have created a graph of speed, height and overlaying the 2 graphs

altitude-speed

I dont know if it shows up great, but as you would expect the top speed is when the glider is in a steep dive at 235 seconds into the flight, at the end of a dive when the glider went from just over 600ft (recorded, not above ground) to just under 500ft in about 6 seconds. The speed is of course very volatile with a glider since the wind was fast enough to be able to bring the glider to a halt in the air with the wind speed keeping air flowing over the wings. As you will notice I’m not very good at it so my glider only appears to stop or come close to stationary on 3 occasions other than take off and landing.

 

Mr Mel is a far better glider pilot than I can hope to be. He has agreed to his tracks and onboard also be added to this post. Although the onboard and the gps track does not relate to the same flight, you can see many better flight characteristics over my fight. Firstly here is the onboard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW-nahPrCVw

As you can see the flight is far smoother than mine, although Mel is still quite critical of how much the glider actually stalls. It show how difficult it can be to fly a glider perfectly when the glider is 500+ft up in the air.

The elevation and the gps track show a much straighter, more uniform climb, he holds position much better in the areas he is getting lift, you can also see this from the speed track which show he is stationary far more often. Perhaps Mr Mel could do a guide to good and bad gliding?

 

20140219090302-31027-profile

glider1-track

glider1-graphs

Although not ground breaking I hope that you found this as interesting as I did.