Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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
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!
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...
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!
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.
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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
Plus batteries. -- krokodil
Remember they have a little 1Hp internal combustion engine. It could generate electricity pretty cheaply and efficiently. Or a little cellphone lithium-ion battery should give plenty of juice. I doubt they're maintaining continuous contact in either direction. Some of the earlier posts suggest the plane is being operated by remote control, like those lame battling robots on TV. But I'm sure the computers are there to make this thing semi-autonomous, checking GPS fixes and sending return telemetry at relatively infrequent intervals (i.e. not constantly) to keep radio use down. The thing is steering from waypoint to waypoint, like commercial autopilots, maintaining a predefined flight profile without somebody steering the thing.
This project is so cool, I'm sure these guys are having the time of their lives.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
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.
We humans tend to notice wind as very turbulent because
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
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. :)
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
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;
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?
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).
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.
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!
---
"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! :)
---
"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."