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11-Pound Model Plane Vs. The Atlantic, Again
Luap Nanreffeh writes "Last year, (/. Story 1, /. story 2) Maynard Hill and some retired NASA buddies tried to set a record for flying a model aeroplane across the atlantic ocean (from Newfoundland to Ireland). Their plan, using GPS, onboard controllers, and a gallon of gas, would have been the first to cross the Atlantic under FAI rules. They didn't have much luck last year, but now they're at it again. The first launch should be tonight."
So, how long until drug runners send little planes from Columbia to Florida?
I remember, back when cruise missiles were first being developed, thinking how a strategic cruise missile (the one with the half-ton payload and restartable turbojet engine) would make a dandy drug smuggling vehicle. Load with a thousand pounds of cocaine, fly it below radar across the Gulf of Mexico and into the door of a large barn in some remote region of the US.
The big problem would be if SAC happened to see it coming. It would look JUST like a strategic cruise misslle coming at the US over the Gulf of Mexico. B-)
They might have gotten away with it back then. But these days the US keeps an AWACS over the Gulf all the time - to look for drug smugglers. Two can play at plowsharing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So, how long until drug runners send little planes from Columbia to Florida?
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Kind of pointless when they can send big planes. During the 1980s, Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel flew gutted 727s from Columbia to the States, loaded to the max with cocaine. Another one of his tricks was to send large numbers of small planes, each loaded with coke, towards the US. The DEA and Customs Service could only catch so many... You can read more about it in Mark Bowden's (author of Black Hawk Down) excellent book, Killing Pablo
Jimmy Buffett also discusses air smuggling in his book, A Pirate Looks at Fifty .
>Based on the first two responses to this post, you'd think people had never heard of inertial
>navigation. With MEMS accelerometers it ought to be pretty light, too.
Pure 3 axis inertial navigation with a strapdown inertial measuring requires extreme precision. MEMS inertial units aren't even in the right ballpark. Mechanical stable platform inertial systems that actually rotated inside the vehicles didn't require awesomely accurate sensors, but they are big, heavy, and not as reliable.
It is a useful programming exercise to write a simulation of a strapdown inertial system and play with bias, noise, and nonlinearity errors (add cross axis coupling and acceleration effects for micromachined gyros for bonus points). Pick reasonable ranges and quantize to 12 bits, then integrate at 100 hz or so. You can start the simulation motionless, but in a minute it will be cruising along at 60 mph in some random direction, hundreds of feet from the start position. An hour later, it will be heading for Mars.
The low end inertial systems that have been moderately soccessful are done by removing gravity from the equation and just doing 2D navigation, and often using other sensors, like magnetometers instead of rate gyros for heading, or odometer readings instead of double integrating accelerometers. Double integration of interrelated noisy sensors with an implicit 1G acceleration is really more demanding than it would initially seem.
The only reason you wouldn't want to use GPS in an ocean crossing is if you are afraid a Bad Guy might be jamming the signals.
John Carmack