Slashdot Mirror
Project OpenSky Takes Off
Jesrad writes "As was reported two years ago on Slashdot, japanese artists, students and engineers under the lead of Kazuhiko Hachiya have taken upon themselves to build a real-size, fully functional Mehve (japanese website), the small jet-powered glider flying wing ridden by anime heroin Nausicaa. They have made a lot of progress, and are now test-flying the full scale, yet unpowered model by tow-launching it along with its thrilled pilot. They're having a lot of fun, too, judging from the movies of the testing sessions."
Isn't this sort of thing illegal here in the states?
I find it possible that something that small could fly and carry a human passenger. What I find much less likely is that it could carry enough fuel for a sustained flight. And if it can't stay in the air for more than a few minutes on it's own power it will never be more than a novelty. (not even a luxury sporting item)
Philosophy.
Is anime heroin better than black tar heroin or china white heroin? I'm going to have to go to Tokyo and ask a heroine.
Not to be needlessly pedantic, but...well, what the hell...to be needlessly pedantic, if it's going to be jet powered, won't it cease being a glider?
I mean, right now it's a glider, but as soon as it's jet powered it'll by definition cease being a glider, right? So what they've really got is a personal glider that they're hoping to develop in to a personal jet aircraft.
...namely, the rationale. It does not help that I am Slashdotting drunk.
In think that you may have meant 'heroine' instead of 'heroin'.
seems like an awful lot of time, effort, and money being wasted on something so insignificant and probably useless...
i say good on 'em!
Good luck guys.
when they get the purple tentacles down so I can start my pr0n career.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
that thing looks really dangerous, there is no roll bar and the pilot is totally exposed. Any kind of crash and that guy is dead.
teh omg kekekekkekekekekeke!!!!11shift!!!1one11eleven
But would Ohmu's be forced to register with the government ...
Or at least Coralize it.
w orks/OpenSky_movie.html
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8080/~hachiya/
-theGreater.
small jet-powered glider
jet: jet-propelled vehicle, especially a jet-propelled aircraft.
glider: A light engineless aircraft designed to glide
That is quite an invention.
but are they wearing pants?
Anyone who's seen the opening sequence from "Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa" (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind ) can understand the type of flight experience they are trying to produce here.
The freedom with which Nausicaa sails around the skies on a flying machine light enough to carry yet strong enough to carry out some hairy aerobatics has figured in many a daydream. Hayao Miyazaki takes our daydreams and puts them on the big screen.
Of course the reality of FAA regulations and principles of aerodynamics tend to get in the way of truly realizing the dreams but I give kudos to these guys for trying.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Booooring.. now when they replicate a fully functional version of Zefram Cochrane's ship from star trek, the phoenix
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sure you can keep it up for hours. See here for a quick run down on human powered flight. Now consider the fact that a lawn mower, with it's tiny tank, provides ten to twenty times as much power as you can sustain and does it for hours on end. It's not far from there to the whole ultralight aircraft industry.
Those things are too dangerous for me but are lots of fun for those who fly them. I like something with a little more power to get out of trouble. Ultralights get blown around and where the wind blows is not always good for you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Nobody knows the trouble I see, nobody knows the sorrow.
Disruptive technology is a tree watered by the blood of the brave. Otto Lelienthal is somewhere watching this.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
That doesn't help, you need to post the coral link to the movies themselves. Coral isn't a rewriting cache/proxy.
m ovie/testflight060526_1.movm ovie/testflight060526_p.movm ovie/fly_01web.avim ovie/fly_02web.movm ovie/pilot_cam_web.movm ovie/howtomakeM01.movm ovie/expo.movm ovie/M-01_test.movm ovie/moewe1_2test02.mov
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
http://www.petworks.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/~hachiya/
heroinEEEEEEEE!!!!!! there's an E!!.
else it's under the jurisdiction of the ATF.
on second thought, maybe the editors purposefully insert egregiouss errors to troll readers into commenting, thus increasing ad revenue.
I had seen their previous RC models -- which really didn't look too much like the glider from the movie -- and thought "OK, that's pretty cool".
This is lightyears beyond cool.
They are fighting a lot of aerodynamic issues to make a human-carrying glider that now looks remarkably like the one in the movie. The challenge in flying wings is to fight the tendency of most wings to pitch down. In addition to this natural tendency, this wing has two things going against it.
1) The "jet" causes drag below the CG
2) The person raises the CG so high that there is a tendency to be unstable
Add to this the fact that the design allows very little sweepback (a typical way to get pitch stability in flying wings (see B2 and Northrop)) then you are really in a bind.
They must have a fabulously high positive pitching-moment airfoil. It is possible to make reasonably efficient airfoils with some positive pitch moment, but unless they've invented something truly revolutionary -- the demands on this airfoil for stability might mean that the glide ratio would not be very good.
Still -- unbelivably impressive. Way to go!
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
They're close to skin color, so unfortunately it isn't terribly obvious. This isn't that kind of anime. Sheesh.
FAQ
I really wish I could "shoot up" those people. Thank-you, thank-you, I'll be here all night.
Anime heroin is two parts narcotic, one part soul of the forest, and one part nanobot. Somebody told me they were starting to put in ground Pikachu, but who could harm that little thing? Except Mew Two, that is.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
"Anime heroin," indeed. I may have a heroine addiction, but anime's not exactly a drug.
Mind you, my DVD shelf is testament to my occasional desire for a "Miyazaki fix." (And a "girls with guns fix." And a "post-apocalyptic adventure fix." And... well, you get the idea.)
I'm only wearing black until they come out with something darker.
I give these people full credit for persuing their idea this far. However they're going to have a very difficult time with a design like this as it is inherently unstable. While it may fly fine when straight and level, perhaps doing gentle moves, it'll be very happy to snap back with some very ugly characteristics when pushed outside of its stability envelope.
:D
A full time computer working on the stability will help a lot, however at some points no amount of computer intervention will re-establish stable flight (ie, tumbling).
Then again, similar things were said about the helicopter
Looking forward to seeing what they end up with... especially for the turbine motor.
A swiss pilot (Yves Rossy) has done it... 2 jet engines and a small deltaving. His homepage (in french) is here.
I'd be more excited to see Kaneda's bike (which is actually plausible, come to think of it).
Under the FAI definitions paragliders and hang-gliders are both in the same category of foot-launced unpowered aircraft, they both have loosely similar flight-characteristsics, tend to share the same airspace and consequently in many countries they (now) share a regulatory body.
Thus it was I came to be on an instructors' course some years ago when the subject of accident prevention and reporting was being discussed and one thing I remember very distinctly about that was that the same mistakes tend to be made time & time again. I guess this applies to all fields, programming as well, but on this occasion it was pointed out how accident reports of 5 years before looked pretty much like the accident reports currently submitted to the association. I guess the statistics were probably lower than you might think and the majority of incidents involved sprained ankles and broken wrists but the causes were typically pilot error, over-confidence, carelessness &/or neglect - the same reasons hang-glider pilots had been having accidents for 20 years.
Likewise it took a few dead paraglider pilots before the introduction of a certification regimen under which manufacturers of gliders were required to submit new their models for testing - a regimen which 10 years ago had recently matured but which bore remarkable similarities to the certification schemes under which hang-gliders had been regulated since the 1970s. And of course the testing for hang-gliders had been introduced for the same reason - dead pilots, just in the early 1970s they were the result of simple Rogalio hang-gliders entering "luffing-dives" whereas in the early 1990s the cause was paragliders "collapsing" in turbulent air &/or finding themselves stable in flat-spins or spirals.
A previous poster wrote that "the freedom with which Nausicaa sails around the skies on a flying machine light enough to carry yet strong enough to carry out some hairy aerobatics has figured in many a daydream" but wings that achieve this goal, this dream, are already widely available. Just because they don't look quite like the one out of your favorite comic book, I don't think that's a great reason to learn aviation design the hard way.
Aviation design is a really complicated discipline with lots of pitfalls, and mistakes may not show up until a wing has been flown for a number of hours, which is kinda inconvenient if you're flying at a few hundred feet at the time. Tailless aircraft are particularly quirky, and last time I checked (a few years ago, admittedly) there weren't many designs available - a tail is just a really easy way to ensure pitch and yaw stability.
Don't get me wrong - this looks like a really great toy, I'd love to have a play with it and I wish these guys the best, but I hope for their sakes that they've done their homework. The veteran pilots I've known who have lost friends to the sport (and I guess that includes me) haven't really known what they were getting into.
ping thepiratebay.nete bay.org (83.140.176.146): icmp_seq=1 ttl=40 time=138 ms
PING thepiratebay.net (83.140.176.146) 56(84) bytes of data.
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Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Build a fully functional EVA! YAY!!! (Yes I'm in love with Rei Ayanami, so what? You know you are, too) :D
Global warming is a cube.
Bring on the mechanized humanoid robots
Pictochat Art!!!
I also agree. Shallow and pedantic.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
Also it was very popular for long time to use volkswagon aircooled motors in lightweight airplanes.
I expect the fuel systems to be a bit different. (injection, fuel rails, (or carb) intake manafold and so on and so forth) But that's nothing compared to what modifications people make for racing or for marine use.
Sure this can result in different loads. As long as the motor is mechanically strong and has good cooling characteristics I don't see how it would make a difference. The cooling is most important.
Except for needing 100% power for lift off or whatnot I expect that the loads the aircraft need (like you said constant 80%) would be MUCH MUCH easier then what a motor faces in a car. It's just that usually the aircraft motor has to be of much higher tolerance and quality then a typical car installation.. If your car breaks down then that is fine, you pull over and call for help. If your airplane motor breaks down then that'll usually result in at minimum severe damage to the airplane and possibly death of it's passenger.
So don't say it isn't done or can't be done.. Because have done it and are doing it very successfully.
I thought for couple of seconds, that the unfamiliar word "Mehve" was a Japanese word for Website. So, I was curous to see how the Japanese websites can be made full size and flown in the sky. And who would "click" on the links in this giant monster in the sky?
this is awesome i loved that glider in the movie, and i loved the movie as well
:D
I just hope we can keep our underpants on
If the jets are used to gain lift until you're to altitude and then turned off to glide, it's much the same thing as the towed gliders that need to be pulled up with a plane- you're just producing something with enough thrust and light enough to carry with you on the glider- if they're running it all the time, it becomes a jet propelled microlight, and anybody with enough know-how can do that one anyhow.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Been done in a few places already:
Kaneda's bike. Here too
What, were we supposed to believe this was "serious work" otherwise?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Google Tools can translate Japanese web pages.
Open Sky homepage
Open Sky movies
\
He's a real aviation buff; I think he'd get a kick out of it.
DNA just wants to be free...
I am not an aerospace engineer, and I don't know how much thrust one would need to get airborne on a glider like that, but there are small piston driven ducted fan engines that currently run hi-powered radio controlled aircraft to over 100Mph. These model aircraft are designed to look like minature fighter jets.
I am a friend of racing engine builder Gregg Hekimian at http://www.hekimianracing.com/ and he has built single cylinder lawnmower engines that can go over 50 Mph carrying a 300lb man running on 93 octane gasoline for a strange sport called lawnmower racing here in the southern USA. The cost of the engine was about $1000.00 US
Again, not an engineer, but it seems to reason that it is possible to build a small lightweight engine that can generate the thrust necessary to keep the aircraft and pilot aloft for a while at modest speeds.
... nothing beats a 'Mech equipped with a jump pack! :D But I must admit overheating is a killer.
This does look interesting however, albeit it won't see the light of day, at least outside Japan.
It's impressive that they're doing this. Moewe has rather low wing area for the slow-speed maneuvering it does in Nausicaa, though. It's certainly possible to make a lively little aerobatic monoplane (the Sukhoi S-26 is one of the best modern ones), but those little wings imply a high stall speed. If you want hang-glider type stall speeds, you need more wing area or less weight. The classic solution for slow flight is the biplane. Take a look at this old Sperry Messenger, which has about the same wingspan as Moewe. The Messenger was a very maneuverable little plane. Sperry himself once landed one in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Moewe's tailless design creates a pitch stability problem from hell, but that's what flight-control computers are for. It's interesting to see what changes they made from the R/C model. The R/C model looks more like Moewe, with straight wings and a huge dihedral angle. The bigger towed model has a bent wing. They're trying for something that wants to fly straight and level.
There's much new interest in light aircraft today. The FAA has created a new category of "light sport planes", heavier than ultralights but lighter than general aviation aircraft, with less restrictive licensing. Take a look at this StingSport, which isn't much bigger than Moewe, even though it's a two-seater.
I expect the Open Sky crowd will build something that looks more or less like Moewe and flies reasonably well. And they'll do it long before Moller gets off the ground.
Perhaps they could trade stability for weight and install a flywheel acting as a gyroscope to increase stability. Would that be practical, or would a flywheel need to be too heavy before it contributed significantly to stability?