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Human-Powered Helicopter Team Sets New Records For Altitude and Flight Duration
First time accepted submitter daltec writes "The $250,000 American Helicopter Society Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition prize, unclaimed since 1980, is now within Gamera II's reach. On Thursday, the University of Maryland's Clark School of Engineering team unofficially satisfied two of the three American Helicopter Society Sikorsky Prize requirements. The giant craft flew for 65 seconds, stayed within a 10 square meter area and hovered at two feet of altitude. New unofficial U.S. and world flight duration records were also set. The team expects to make their next attempt Saturday." That's today!
Not in Australia. It's yesterday.
well. did they do it?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Not gonna lie, first thought was "Oh, so we can make biofuels from people now?"
The requirement they accomplished is a 10 meter square, not 10 square meters.
The aircraft was damaged Thursday evening after another attempt at altitude. The team has repaired the craft though and resumed testing just a few minutes ago. The flights are taking place at the Prince George's Sports and Learning Complex, 8001 Sheriff Road, Landover, MD 20785, if you want to see their latest attempts!
We have to eat happy eggs from happy chickens.
They need to hire Lance Armstrong. I doubt they can ban him from peddling on this.
To be a real helicopter, it needs to be able to fly out of ground effect.
This would be at least a height equal to the diameter of the propellor, or 40 meters height about with the current prop.
Under this height, it gains significant advantage from being next to the ground - it's behaving like a hovercraft, not a helicopter.
See the nice graph at http://www.copters.com/aero/ground_effect.html - two thirds of the way down.
At 1/4 (10m altitude for the above device) the thrust is 20% better than at altitude.
You could in principle make a free-flight helicopter by bolting two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Daedalus 's to a light spar, so it's in principle possible.
But getting 9 feet in the air? That is seriously hard, and no craft I've seen has gotten close.
If you can't be bothered to RTFA then at least WTFV, it shows their craft getting up 8 feet in the air.
http://www.agrc.umd.edu/gamera/index.html
Here is a video from an attempt with crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmea3odVgDE#! it seems repaired.
But this contraption only hovers a meter above ground, making tremendous use of the ground effect.
Rules here
It appears that the 10-meter square is a leeway area, meaning that the craft must not move more than 5 m from the starting point in the cardinal directions, or more than 7.07 m in the 45 degree diagonal directions.
Why not make it simpler with a circular leeway area? No idea.
The funniest thing I saw was this rule:
"4.1.2 The machine shall be a rotary wing configuration capable of vertical takeoff and landing in still air, and at least one member of the crew shall be non-rotating. "
It looks like in another flight they reached about 2.5 meters (8 feet) so they're close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmea3odVgDE#
Today they unofficially broke nine feet. There was an NAA observer there who will certify the altitude, but even he said it was about 9.3 feet. And if 3 meters is about 9.8 feet, they were really close. Unfortunately, something broke and the vehicle crashed, well short of the required 60 seconds.
We have to eat happy eggs from happy chickens.