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11-Pound Model Plane Vs. The Atlantic
merrell writes: "Apparently some model plane builders are going to send some balsa wood loaded with some tiny computers and GPS receiver across the Atlantic, running on less than a gallon of gas. The Washington Post has an article on it. Just goes to show what some retired NASA engineers with lots of free time can do. :)" If this was a movie, it might sound too unlikely.
Are you on crack? Define your terms! Wood is stronger than steel in what test *per pound* tensile strength? I think not. Give me some numbers, make them ANSI aproved, please.
Balsa: a.A tropical American tree (Ochroma pyramidale) having wood that is soft, very light in weight, and that is used as a substitute for cork in insulation, floats, and crafts such as model airplanes.
Secondly, soft, and hard wood is differentiated by how fast it grows. Balsa grows DAMN FAST. An Oak? Mahogony? Sure, give it a few decades, plus some. They are two very different classifications, balsa is a soft wood.
Weight? Isn't 11-pound the price?
Now it is possible for individuals or small groups to build private cruise missiles. Think of a high tech version of Black Sunday... or imagine what would happen to the United States if someone flew a 1000lb pilotless bomb into the 2002 Oscars!
or if it flies too high, it'll get burned by the sun!
"And then we added a few pounds of high explosive and changed the final co-ordinates to something more interesting." Wonder what the waypoint accuracy of this thing is? Dropping bombs down airshafts not just for the USAF anymore! Wheeeee!
Ha, a good engineer will go to any amount of effort to avoid extra effort.
Balsa isn't strong...yeah right. You are right, it's not strong. Strength comes from engineering. In a high school Odyssey of the Mind competition, we build a struncture out of balsa, and super glue, that weighed 8 grams, and held in excess of 500Lbs. We used all the weights availabe, and it still did not break. We tried an experiment on our own, and found that it held 800lbs for 10 minutes. 10lbs/gram! Our play sucked balls, and we lost to a group who had some big chested girls. So much for Odyssey of the Mind!!!
The mylar they are using is pretty impervious to weather. My son lost a R/C plane in a corn field, and we didnt get it back for almost 3 months. It had survive pretty well except for the radio equipment. They say they are using camp stove fuel, which means they are probably using a 4 cycle engine, and an ignition system. A 2 cycle engine does not have the fuel economy that is needed for this. Also with the ignition systme, they are getting telemetry for the engine RPM.
Check out this!
http://www.insitugroup.com/LaimaFlight.html
This plane was a little bigger, and made mostly out of carbon/epoxy composites, but it weighed 29 lbs and flew trans-atlantic on a gallon and a half of gas! The first unmanned trans-atlantic flight ever!
The University of Washington Aero/Astro department is trying to build one to cross the pacific first too, but those guys at the air force beat us to it. Of course, their budget was MUCH bigger than ours.... Our airplane is only 50 lbs and 6 feet long!
Yes, they make a perfect delivery system for a terrorist. Zero cross section on radar, silent, incredibly hard to see, and they can carry a decent payload. Help me out here. I don't stare at O-scopes for a living, but wouldn't these things give some kind of radar return? I don't know if wood and Mylar would absorb, reflect, or transmit radar-frequency RF. But if we're talking about relatively sophisticated, modern radar, I don't think that's the whole story; there's more to detecting an aircraft than getting a "skin paint" off the wing and fuselage surfaces. For modern aircraft, radar-return design considerations include things like how visible the jet engines' impeller blades are to radar waves. To some extent the internals of an aircraft can reflect radar waves, causing a return, if the radar energy isn't dissipated or "trapped" using stealth materials and design techniques. The avionics, payload, engine, and prop at least would have some characteristic, if significantly small, signature, right? I'm thinking that in conjunction with computers that do image analysis, they'd look somewhat different from a bird -- at least in flight behavior, if not radar cross-section itself. I gotta admit, though, the image in the mind's eye is hilarious: swarms of these things, each carrying 10 kilos of pure cocaine or heroin, cruising serenely past a DEA aerostat in the dead of night....War On Some Drugs my @$$.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I remember reading the account of Maynard Hill's 33 hr. endurance flight in Model Aviation magazine when I was a teenager. It was amazing at that time that anyone could keep an airplane up for that long. The biggest surprise for me is that it's taken around 20 years for them to make this attempt. :-)
--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
Ah, but he puts more effort once into avoiding the work, so then he can avoid the work again and again and again and again and...
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
IIRC, there is a prevailing wind that should ensure them a good chance of tailwinds for this trip - the same prevailing winds that people use for Atlantic balloon crossings.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Fat chance, buddy.
I'm sure the security guards at Area 51 are equipped with full-automatic weapons, and with nightscopes and modern M16A1's that model airplane you're suggesting will be blown to pieces from all the small-arms gunfire.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
However, given the fuel consumption of those little turbine engines, unless you can build a plane to be mostly a flying fuel tank you'll be lucky if you can fly it more than a few miles.
That's why modern jet airliners have fuel tanks that carry fuel in the thousands of gallons.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Given that the accuracy of satellite GPS is under 30 feet nowadays, the frightening thing is that anyone that knows how to make nerve gas (if you can make insecticide you can make nerve gas) could build a GPS guided model plane filled with 1 kg of Sarin, which when dropped would kill everyone within a 250-300 feet radius of the release point in open air. You could literally fly one and drop it off in front of the New York Stock Exchange. (shudder)
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Did you see that Junkyard Wars (TLC show where people build groovy gadgets from spare parts and compete the gadgets against each other) where they built the gas-effecient vehicles? Now that was impressive.
:)
:)
I've been looking at the Honda Insights because they get around 70mpg which I think is impressive but yeh 3000mpg just blows that away! To bad I'm to big to sit on a model plane.
At a recent LUG meeting we had a guy from our Universities solar car team give a talk and he mentioned that some people have built motorcycles that are entirely solar powered. To me that would be the best. I'm seriously considering trying to build one for myself. Has anyone experience in such things? My biggest question is the legality of driving such a thing on the highway. It'd be awesome to take roadtrips and never have to buy gas though.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Things that weigh less are less likely to be torn apart in the wind. They have less inertia, and so will simply move with it instead of breaking. Being slammed into the ocean isn't a problem if they don't fly really low. The main problem would be prevailing winds opposite the direction they're going, forcing more fuel use or something like that. Since the winds are usually west-to-east, this shouldn't be a problem.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"Honest, officer, I was just adding another 4000 nodes to my Google cluster! Why won't you believe me??"
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
"I'm sure these guys are having the time of their lives"
I'm not so sure about that. I saw a mention that at least one of these guys was involved in the Gemini and Apollo projects at NASA.
I'm sure that at least for that guy, this is just another fun project to toy with.
Working on a first in basically letting people sit on top of an explosion in an effort to leave the planet is hard to top.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Agreed.
I can only hope that when I retire, I have surrounded myself with friends to do such things with all my sudden spare time too.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I guess that makes me a funny (6), overrated (4) troll (1)?
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
1) They don't lose contact with it
2) They converted all their metric units correctly
3) It does not burn up in the atmosphere on approach
4) It doesn't accidentally ram and bring down any foreign fighters flanking it.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Yeah yeah, balsa wood isn't nano-tech, I know. But the first horse-drawn carriage didn't look much like a Ferrari F1 racecar, either.
--Mid
Folks, look at:
http://www.aerosonde.com/atlantic_crossing.htm
This group, using modified RC airplane parts, made such a crossing in 1998. Their plane is now in the Smithsonian.
This is what you get when you let brilliant minds do whatever they feel like doing. Somehow, it feels more valuable than what a lot of my working friends are doing at dot-com flameouts.
There's a lot to be said for letting brilliant people do whatever they want, without giving them much money. It's this sort of spirit that used to drive dot-coms, back before incubators, before the stock boom took off and everything was about stock valuations. Suddenly, millions of dollars were flying around, and everybody was under pressure to turn it into profits.
What's your damage, Heather?
Return of the successful plane will be by placing the high bid on eBay.
..., some special Texan circuit closes in their brain, and the next thing you know is they are shooting away.
Thank God none of them is in a real position of power... D'oh!
Easy - because as the article said, they're making sure this thing qualifies as a "model airplane" - this limits them to 11 pounds total weight.
Think about that for a second - that's 11 pounds (5 Kg to those in less enlightened parts of the world) for airframe, powerplant, GPS navigation, computer control systems, radio gear, servos, batteries, and oh yeah, enough fuel to fly across the Atlantic ocean.
This is a "righteous" hack - my hat's off to these guys. I only wish I were part of their team...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Here is the link to support this project:
http://www.dc-rc.org/STAR.HTM
They're looking for donations to help defray the cost of equipment, supplies, travel for the team, etc.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
As someone who started out in computers by building robots to build composite airplanes, I can tell you that balsa has some remarkable properties. Its only real problem is that as you scale up to larger structures, natural defects in the material become more problematic, which is why it's so darn difficult to get large pieces of mil-spec structural balsa.
There are cases where balsa is notably superior to other materials though - I can give you two right off the bat from modern airplanes: The cargo load floors in some military cargo planes are a sandwich of aluminum skins bonded to a balsa core. Balsa is an ideal core material here, even though it's heavier than alternatives like aluminum or nomex honeycomb, it's also many times tougher and more resistant to the damage that you can imagine the floor of a cargo plane takes, and also makes the floor puncture-resistant. Another example is the wing tank structure in the A-7 fighter jet, another aluminum/balsa composite structure that provides properties unobtainable by using other materials.
If there were more aerospace grade balsa available (and there are people working on genetic improvements to eliminate grain defects and even grow "square" trees), we would see it used much more often. Many natural materials are far, far better than our best synthetic substitutes, but they're not always in a readily usable form. (Take spider silk fibers as an example - we know they're they're much stronger than anything we can make, but we can't figure out how to make them...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Well, there have been a few exceptions.
To find one, it's best to look at what the "mainstream" news media ignores if they can (and screws up the story when they can't) or perhaps look to companies that never even had an IPO and still have some dude yammering on about old-fashioned stuff like economic fundamentals, and bragging about being in the black while keeping the promises others made about the internet.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Not sure if the link you reference meets the following:
'Hill said his plane will meet the international definition of a model: It must weigh only 11 pounds and be hand-launched. "That's the real challenge," he said.'
They talked about others too:
"Technically, his model won't be the first robot plane to cross an ocean.
Earlier this week, an Air Force robot spy plane successfully flew 8,600 miles across the Pacific from California to Australia. And three years ago, a private unmanned weather reconnaissance plane reportedly crossed the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Scotland.
But the Air Force drone is bigger than a jetliner, and the weather plane weighed 29 pounds and was launched from the roof of a car.
I think that seeing a squadron of small balsa-wood planes flying overhead would certainly attract my attention more that a single one.
With a GPS on them, they should be able to keep a fairly tight formation.
Ian.
While in AussieLand the Global Hawk is being trialed by the Australian Coastwatch (Federal Police I assume) to search our northern coastline for illegal immigrants and other assorted boats/planes that shouldn't be there either.
The other things to bear in mind is that it possibly travels a little faster than the Spirit of Butts Farms, which is a good thing considering how much coastline there is.
Actually, it might have to contend with our own brand of Redneck/Crazed Texan's up there too.
Not a problem, if the destination is in the middle of the desert somewhere. For that matter, the destination coords could be kept in a volatile memory, which loses power if the aircraft crashes, or if it simply times out.
As for losing the payload, the profit margin is certainly high enough that even a 20-30% loss rate is affordable.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, I guess this is the solution to the problem of Peruvian fighters shooting down unarmed civilians at the CIA's behest.
I'm sure it's worth $500 in materials for a drug runner to send a kilogram of cocaine across a border in a package too small for airborne radar to target it. Shoot, with a bit of clever software, they could even do it with a sailplane. (No engine, even smaller radar cross-section.)
A few years back, the company I worked for was across the hall from a US Customs office in Reston Virgina, and I had a conversation with a customs officer about smuggling technology. I was very surprised to learn that radio-control boats were first used for smuggling liquor across the great lakes and the Niagra river in the 1920's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Now this is great to see. We need more projects like this to keep bored retirees off the street and away from the temptations that are offered there. Why just the other day in the neighorhood Denny's, I was accosted by a grim little man whose bravado was no doubt enhanced by the support of his fellow grandslammers. He yelled in his reedy voice, "Hey buddy! I got my social security! And you're paying for it!!!" which was followed by the raucous laughter of his comrades...
Damn, I never have mod points when I need them.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I mentioned that to a guy who's building a working replica of the "Spirit of St. Louis"
He looked at me funny and told me that the plane was steel and fabric. He even rattled off the type of steel it was, mentioned that it's not used anymore for aircraft.
I'm surprised no one here has thought of ice buildup on the wings of this model aircraft. Maybe they put in some kind of heat pipe on the leading edge.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Last weekend, most of the team gathered at the horse pasture in northern Montgomery County lent by veteran aviator Beecher Butts, 88, whose charity has prompted the modelers to name their plane "The Spirit of Butts Farm."
Hope the wind's aroma isn't too frightening!
A large portion of the cocane in the US comes across the US/Mexico border. Just because it usually involves americans to take part, it still needs to cross the border.
And no, the US doesn't *just* watch for drugs comming across the border.We do areal survalence looking for people growing drugs, monitor electrical bills watching for people growing pot hydroponically, search inbound ocean vessels, watch for people buying chemicals to make Meth, and any number of of other tactics.
I happen to think that a large part of the "war on drug"s is irrational, but to suggest that we are naive enough to believe that drugs only come from mexico is just wrong.
Glass Fiber is heavy.
Balsa has excellent specific propertis,
The structural loads should also be pretty minimal, since it is only 11lbs.
As already proven, if cocain somehow managed to completely dissapear it would be easily replaced by something else. The war is futile as nobody has realized the enemy is themselves. Doesn't matter how many sources you plug as long as there is a demand. The real trick is to stop the demand and all of a suden the supply will dissapear. TV commercials are great and all, but the millions spent on prevention would be better spent on education. 'Drugs are bad.. Mkay'
Rod Taylor
I just love how everyone assumes that all drugs are coming from outside the USA (atleast I believe thats the 'war' you mean) and somehow doesn't require any americans to take part in the trafficing. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Rod Taylor
An 11-pound plane probably can't carry that much of a payload... even using multiple planes you're probably talking about pretty large overhead costs compared to more traditional means.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Today, there are dirigible-carried radars along our southern borders watching for smuggling planes. Will they see a plane like this, flying at a few hundred feet AGL? Not likely!
The only good weather is bad weather.
See that model spy plane on Scientific American Frontiers? It was just a few inches across, and almost silent. Of course, you would need to make it a little bigger to mount the electronics on, but it would still be almost impossible to hit.
BTW: Ducted Fans can go faster than turbines in a lot of cases(about 250 mph rather than 190). Pulse Jets(IIRC) go even faster, at about 250-300 mph.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Wow, you sure are clueless. I've been flying R/C airplanes for years, and I regularilly buzz the tarmac, even with my low speed human reflexes. If I used a closed loop feedback system coupled with a Sonar and a dampener to avoid wild oscillation, unattended flying at 10 feet above the ground is very achievable.
You are the weakest link, goodbye!
The obvious project this inspires is equipping a model airplane with a digital camera, gps, nav computer, and sending it to Area 51 to get some recon shots. Using sonar, you could have the plane fly right on the deck, maybe less then 10 feet high for the final approach and during the evasion afterwards. If your model plane makes a lot of turns and stays at low altitude, there's no way Area 51 security could follow it reliably, and they probably couldn't scramble a helicopter fast enough. Plus, if it's not transmitting, they can't track that either.
You could launch this baby from Vegas or out in the desert a couple hundred miles away from anything interesting so there would be no way for them to track you...
Just think of the potential for ordering in pizza and Beer!
http://www.sbceo.k12.ca.us/~sbhs/department/scienc e/sanchez/box_kite.htm (near the bottom)
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Well technically this sort of thing has been done once already. As the article mentions, a group of robotics researchers already sent a 29 pound aircraft to make the same flight in 1998. Here is a link. I believe they are now planning a Pacific crossing. Their original Atlantic plane cost around $10,000 dollars though, its now hanging in a flight museum in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. The plane, named "Laima" after a Latvian Goddess of Good Luck, was the third of four of their planes to attempt the crossing. The first and fourth were lost in transit and the second died because of a flight computer malfunction shortly after takeoff. Now this smaller craft has all the same problems of size Laima did, but with the added problem of significantly flimsier construction and probably weaker flight AI. Somehow I doubt its going to make it but good luck all the same.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
They mention in the article something about tracking the plane progress. This means there is some kind of transmitter on board.
GPS receiver could be pretty small, but radio transmitter having enough power to send signal back half way accross the ocean would be quite heavy. Plus
batteries. I wonder how it is possible to put
it on this tiny model.
Also, I know there are pictures of it on the 'net (they were on slashdot not too long ago), ether from the mountian or from satellites flying over the base.
You don't really think the Air Force would be stupid enough to leave the alien ship tied down on the tarmac, do you?
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Just add a camera (how big would it have to be?) and you can start spying on china or whoever. I mean, its immune to radar right (its just gonna like like a bird if it shows up at all).
or if it flies too high, it'll get burned by the sun!
:)
Silly people. Serves them right for sticking on the wings with wax!
--
Yeah, as I understand it, almost all planes that crash into the ocean first fly really low.
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
Wow, what an interesting new device for drug trafficking. Strap the dope in the pilot's seat, fly that sucker at just above tree-top level, send it to Cousin Vinny... Hell, I don't know anything about it, but if this model plane can make it across the Atlantic, then it can certainly carry drugs across a border.
Even better idea: Fly a model airplane across the Atlantic powered by a hamster on a wheel.
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
Don't worry, the points this has gotten so far ought to be enough to bring it to the attention of anybody reading the thread, and barring further bizzare moderation I don't need the karma.
KFG
That's simple enough. Just make sure that the combined weight of you and your car are no more than 11 lbs.
KFG
I'm afraid I don't, and I can't find one either.
You see, in the old days, 20 or 30 years ago, we used a medium of information dissemination called "print".
That's about how long ago this happened and if the story has found its way to the web it's hiding from all of us.
It was two gentleman from the midwest that did this. It took them many years to get a successful crossing. Every year they would travel to Cape Cod, ( by their analysis that is where the prevailing winds eastward gave the greatest chance of success), and release dozens of kites tied to buckets.
To each kite they attached a note, and HALF of a ten dollar bill, promising anyone that found the kite that they could claim the other half by calling them and telling them where the kite was recovered.
I might have first run across the story in New Yorker, or it might have been Smithsonian or even National Geographic. I'm really not sure this many decades down the road.
KFG
I see someone's been feeding the moderators wacky weed again.
Flamebait? I can't figure it. It's a true story, one that I have found fascinating for decades and thought others might be interested in hearing about as well.
Perhaps its absence from the www has convinced someone that it can't be real?
Life happened before 1990. Not all of it has been transfered to the web.
KFG
In point of fact wood is stronger than steel * per pound.*
It is strength per unit of weight that is critical in this particular undertaking.
And contrary to what most think softwood is stronger than hardwood * per pound.*
ALSO contrary to what most people think Balsa is a hardwood, not a softwood. The terms hard and soft wood are biological classifications, not an actual discription of the wood.
KFG
A kite has already made the trip across the Atlantic unattended.
The kite was tied to a bucket which was filled with water and dropped into the sea. The bucket held the string of the kite and the kite dragged the bucket with the prevailing winds.
Cape Cod to Ireland.
KFG
i read the article yesterday in the post. One of the most amazing parts of this whole project is that the main man is legally blind and mostly deaf. he put the plane together in his basement using lots of really thick pairs of glasses and he dyed the glue pink so that he could see it. i think that's pretty cool.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
"Things that weigh less are less likely to be torn apart in the wind. They have less inertia, and so will simply move with it instead of breaking."
That's nice if there is a uniform force, but apply a torque and that bitch will snap in half.
Let's see a cost comparison with the USAF's Global Hawk (which flew to Australia a week ago).
:)
Now go and ask yourself that question.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, but did you really deserve an award for balancing a 500 lb stack of weights on a wafer of balsa with a dab of glue on it? (Might want to define structure more :) )
-Drassk
August, 1998. On South Uist island in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, a group of men huddled around a van, jacketed against the 25 knot wind. There was no way that they could hear the sound of the aircraft's engine over the persistent whistling of the gale; they would see it -- if they saw it at all -- before they would hear it. And it was an hour overdue on a potentially historic flight.
The small, single-engined craft was attempting the first solo flight across the Atlantic, but this was more of a solo than the one Lindbergh made some 70 years earlier. Where there had been one pilot on that flight, which was for Lindbergh the irreducible minimum crew, there was none on Laima. The plane was trying to fly itself solo from one side of the ocean to a particular spot on the other side. Instead of a compass and stars to steer by, it had a microprocessor and a global positioning system (GPS) receiver...
Read the rest at:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/j_raskin_1.html
In the February 01 Wired, look at Seascan, a joint
Insitu Group (http://www.insitugroup.com) and University of Washington Aero/Astro (http://www.aa.washington.edu)UAV. Fall flight target: cross-pacific on a "few"
gallons of gas. Interesting communications, instrumentation.
nemesys
Wait a sec... Did your Balsa structure weight 8 grams or 80 grams? if it held 800lbs for 10 mins. then that would be 100lbs/gram (if the structure was 8 grams). Which was it 80g (making your structure 10lbs/1g) or 8g (which would make it 100lbs/1g)?
"If you're going through Hell, keep going." -Winston Churchill
Yeah, but it wouldn't be as impressive. It's not how much effort you save, it's how elegant your laziness is.
Laziness comes in two forms: avoiding the necessary and doing something with a minimal amount of work just to impress people.
...it was under a contract from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, made by a corporation for a University. It was launched from a moving car. And it was over twice as heavy. The current plane is an entirely grassroots kinda thing.
Sorry, but honestly, I can't wait to see a commercial app out of these. Newspaper companies could use fleets of them to deliver papers (particularly to remote houses). Fast Food companies could one-up drive throughs. It could even solve some of the US Postal Service's troubles
Of course that begs the question: aren't we lazy enough already?
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
As a Newfoundlander I can assure you the sun won't be the problem, The Rock, as we call the island, is renowned for its aversion to sunshine. We are even hosting an International Fog Conference this year.
Suddenly, millions of dollars were flying around, and everybody was under pressure to turn it into profits.
Actually, the dot-com flameout was due to there NOT being any pressure to make a profit!
"And like that
I can't say I know much much about powered RC. I have one, but mostly fly gliders. All the models I use are glass fiber or EPP.
:-)
I also don't know much about 45 mph models, haven't flown one of them in years
The real question is whether the weather will work in their favour. Assuming that they have a model that will fly the distance. If it's too sunny the wings may warp (twist) causing an increase in drag and more problems for the autopilot. IIRC rain doesn't mix well with mylar, although I'd guess it's been sealed because of engine output (fluid etc.). They didn't say what king of engine they are using, if it's a glow engine they may get more problem with rain.
I'm not quite sure why they didn't build a glass fiber model. It isn't that difficult to do. They usually run well in the rain, if slower.
It should be interesting to see how well they do.
--
Murphy Bitter
"Opening at an airport near you Hamster Airlines. A low cost solution to moving you pets."
--
Murphy Bitter
P.S. I have heard of people putting hamsters in models, they usually don't survive. The G's are usually way too high.
Not to mention birds have a rather complicated brain for their size...compared to a computer. Therefore they use less energy making adjustments to pitch and attitude on the fly...um, wait a second...
We humans tend to notice wind as very turbulent because
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Birds fly over the open ocean. Birds weigh less than 11 pounds. Ever see a bird just sitting there in a gust of wind when it should be moving forward? Assuming good engineering, and given the altitude of the plane, it should be fine. Don't assume that it's weak just because it's balsa wood either. Five pounds of balsa wood (well, probably considerably less when you factor in surface materials and electronics) is plenty to build a craft to stand up to ocean winds.
I work in a secret government lab
Not any more...
I fly Model Airplanes as well, and i know what you mean. Most people think that balsa wood is so weak. What most people don't know is that it is the strongest wood per pound in existance. And with the stuff we cover our planes in guarding against shear, they are really tough.
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't believe me just search for model airplane club pages, and look for stories of what our models go through, and are still flyable!....okok...i guess most of the crashes qualify as still "repairable" ones. :)
Ask ANYBODY who has flown a model airplane about your "10 feet off the ground" maneuver. Any little gust of wind will have it crashing. Whenever I do any maneuvers THAT close to the ground, it is the hardest, and most stressful part of flying. I can see small, light computers being able to fly a plane across the ocean using waypoints at a few thousand feet. Lots of time for compensation for gusts, etc. But terrain-following? Get real.
This isn't to say someone SHOULDN'T try flying a plane over Area 51. I think that'd be cool. Since you aren't going trans-ocean (maybie only from the next state, or somewhere similarly annonymous) a good high-resolution camera wouldn't be that difficult to mount. Flying at 300-400 feet AGL, you would still get awesome pictures. And with a transimitter, even if your plane gets shot down (by rifles, etc. Wouldn't be that difficult to hit, even at night. The heat of the engine would be easy to spot) you will still have the images. :)
Suddenly, millions of dollars were flying around, and everybody was under pressure to turn it into profits.
What dotcomm was that? The one universal thing all dot-coms I've heard of did was avoid any attempts to make any sort profit whatsoever. Selling stuff at cost(buy.com), delivering stuff to your hone without charging for delivery (kozmo.com), not charging for shipment of computer equipment(outpost.com), delivery costs more than the actual item (pets.com), spending hundreds of millions before launching a website (boo.com), etc.
Theoretically you are right, but...
HTHIf the plane flies upside down too long, the engine won't get fuel after some time - the fuel tank "needs" (the right) gravity to deliver fuel to the engine.
So there is a need for the correct orientation of the plane. There is also a simple solution for the orientation problem: If the plane reacts wrong for up/down *and* left/right - then it's flying upside down.
Not unless you can get something like that for less than $1.60.
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
Also, 45 mph (Target speed) == 66 ft/sec. If the wind was to, say, force the nose down (As you say, it'll move - or change orientation), it would take just over 30 seconds for the plane to descend to ocean level, and that's not taking into consideration the extra velocity added by the wind. Granted, the engineers could probably pull it out before then, but what if they encountered a strong, continual downdraft?
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
Anyone thinking this is silly has not been reading the rest of the news lately. This plane has no crew to hold hostage.
Some of my friends were testing a Magellan GPS while fishing. It reported that their fishing boat, using an electric trolling motor, was going at speeds of over 200 MPH. Needless to say, they soon exchanged it for a Garmin.
Help find a cure for Gidget.
Now all we need is for someone to write the three-line-perl-RSA-implementation on the side of it for the most stylish arms-trafiking stunt in history.
Seriously tho' doesnt it occur to anyone that if this does succeed, it could have very serious implications for smuggling (Like thinks how much crack this thing could carry with it per-flight with a little modification),
Of course the simple internet minded solution would be to legally threaten the balsa-growers, the plane-sellers, and the gasoline-vendors while letting the crack whores continue unmolested.
------------ Dom Howells
use Blunt::Instrument;
Daniel
Three thousand (give or take) miles per gallon - now if only my CAR would be that efficient!
Yeah, but then the gas monopoly(s) would just sell gas at $300/gallon.
On the upside this would be better on the atmosphere.
Maskirovka
My guess is that in that case, as well as in the drug transport scenario mentioned above, designing a controller to give this thing much accuracy is probably difficult. Even with a GPS, it's still pretty much at the mercy of the wind. Not to belittle their efforts, but "Europe" is a pretty big target compared to Area 51 or Vinny's backyard. I'd consider an RC job much more viable. With this thing, you could likely get some photos (not necessarily the ones you wanted), but to retreive them it would have to send a homing signal.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Come now, show some inventiveness!
-delivering a bio-warfare pathogenic payload
-smuggling contraband
-auto-paparazzi for island-owning recluses like Brando
-flying a small nuclear payload under enemy radar
We're human beings! We'll always find wonderful uses for any technological acheivement!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
As a kid I used to build "stick and tissue" CO2 powered models with a simple pendulum "guidance" system. Trickiest part was getting the right amount of friction at the pendulum pivots to keep the model from over-compensating, and to design around the center of gravity shift for the pitch control. Once the rig was setup properly though, you could "program" it to do all sorts of neat stuff, by offsetting the pendulums. Balsa kits were around $5.00, and pendulums were made from fishing weights and paper clips.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
Been done before. :)
Saw it in an Air and Space mag about 6-8 months ago for memory.
To lazy to go drag it out though
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
www..--..net - for incisive, w
If it flew the other way across, they'd have to check it for foot and mouth desease....
Cool thing to do: Go to a hobby shop near you and check out a finished plane. Usually the staff there have a few (or more) models which they've built and use for display. You can see firsthand that it's not just the wood, but the covering and wing mounting hardware that all combine to make one seriously strong and light platform.
:)
Now, keep in mind that I said "properly built" in the first post. If it's not glued properly, it'll suck
Robyn
Actually, you might be surprised just how strong (and light) a properly designed and built balsa wood airframe can be. Covered with mylar (MonoKote or similar) these things are durable, stiff, yet flexible enough to take many poundings. I have built and flown several model airplanes (powered and non-powered) in my life. Frankly, my piloting ability stinks, and I've witnessed first-hand how well these things can survive the earth rising up to smite them. A storm would just vlow it around a lot, and probably eat up the fuel supply long before it broke anything. -Robyn
Smuggling isn't a problem. I work in a secret government lab, we are already training genetically modified seagulls to bring these babies down (at least during mating season).
These balsa planes are too small to carry explosives or chemical hazards. But a few ounces of bio-warfare cargo like ebola, or hoove & mouth, anything else some crazy can think off. Probably the most economically damaging and easiest to pull off would be to fly a crop disease. Too bad the winds move from west to east, I'd make a nice little surpirse package for China.
That sounds reasonable.. but I still can't beleive a wing wouldn't get severed or something in an ocean storm :P
No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure you know what you're dealing with. As an R/C modeler, I can tell you that the incredibe tensile strength of stretched, bonded mylar that we coat our planes in combines very well with the compressive and torsional strength of balsa to create some really sturdy aircraft. I've flown balsa gliders into precision landings in winds gusting up to 50mph.
Lindbergh's plane was cloth over wood!
As far as mounting telemetry in these suckers... yawn? Yes, they make a perfect delivery system for a terrorist. Zero cross section on radar, silent, incredibly hard to see, and they can carry a decent payload.
The big holdup has always been the telemetry, which is quite different than a robotic aircraft. Robotic R/C planes, if perfected and made cheap, would be... a law enforcement nightmare.
My guess is that they (law encforcement) have already thought about this for a while.
And it's the gas that's probably the most expensive part of the aircraft.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
that the practical applications of this are phenomenal! :) Just kidding. It is actually pretty neat. Three thousand (give or take) miles per gallon - now if only my CAR would be that efficient!
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"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."
2) They converted all their metric units correctly
3) It does not burn up in the atmosphere on approach
Sorry, couldn't resist! :)
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"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."
It was funny until you started analyzing it.