When the facts don't fit, call names and hurl insults?
I don't give a rip *what* Congress or the Supreme Court said -- the FACTS are written in ink in the Constitution.
We had the same party in the majority in Congress and in the White House, and they saw a chance to make a power grab for the Republican party. Bush having recently stacked the deck with two conservative judges in the Supreme Court just made it more likely that their legacy wouldn't fail the judicial test.
If you had paid attention in history and civics class, however, you would understand why so many people here on/. -- including those moderators you griped about -- are upset by this. It *IS* a Really Big Deal (t.m.) and I'm saddened that we as a nation are so freaking apathetic that it's only a vocal minority who seem to care about it.
How can his actions, both then and now, possibly be based on his belief that he's right? Before the Senate vote, he stated several times that he would not vote to grant telco immunity in the wiretapping case. Then when push came to shove, he voted for it anyway. Now that he's president, he's putting his seal of approval on wiretapping.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but it looks to me like he wants the power; he just didn't want anyone *else* to have it. Because, you know, he's the Good Guy and will only use it responsibly...cough, cough.
As long as there are no complications, that is. When my daughter was born, she spent the first five days of her life in the NICU due to a respiratory infection. IIRC, that was around $20K after paying for the birth and related expenses.
While most middle-class Americans can cough up $4K with a little advance planning, a surprise of an additional $20K can be a pretty heavy load.
So, while I really hope your baby is born healthy and there are no unwelcome surprises (I wouldn't wish five days of not knowing whether or not your baby will ever get to go home on anybody), don't fool yourself into thinking that you can plan for all medical expenses by preparing a little ahead of time.
But it is kind of satisfying to see him reveal that he's not quite the guy that so many people see up on that pedestal.
I couldn't disagree more.
I did not vote for Obama, and I have a lot of reservations about having him as president. However, I was hoping that, since he has now been elected and sworn in, he *would* turn out to be the guy that everyone else seemed to think he was. I would be tickled pink to see him prove me wrong, because that would mean I would live in a country I was proud of again. After eight years of Bush in office, I would really like to see the United States return to the ideals that I was always taught America stands for back when I was in school.
Am I surprised that Obama is showing his true colors now that he is in office? No. Am I disappointed, however? Absolutely.
I am politically conservative, but have made no secret of the fact, here on/. and elsewhere, that the Bush administration blatantly abused their power. I would love to have seen Bush impeached and on trial for violating his oath to uphold the Constitution. Because of the direction the Republican party took during the last eight years, I now fall more in line with the Libertarian political ideology than the Republicans'.
Meh. Just because there exists an obtuse way of doing things in Perl doesn't mean you *have* to do it that way.
I *like* Perl. I've used it since ~2001 and it's my "go to" (not "goto" -- that's obviously bad:) language of choice. However, despite the fact that I'm comfortable with things I've written in Perl doesn't mean I can always read someone else's code.
However, the same can be said of JavaScript and pretty much any other language I've ever used...with the possible exception of Python, which from my limited experience *always* looks clean, no matter who wrote the code.
The problem with your argument is that a "reasonable amount of time" changes as computer speeds change. Since modern cryptography is based on factoring extremely large numbers, it becomes easier to compute the prime numbers that are used to create the ciphers as computation speeds improve. Therefore what might be "secure" today might be (relatively) trivial to crack in a few years. If it is important to keep your data safe a few years from now, then encryption is probably not good enough. On the other hand, if your data only needs to be kept secure until your product goes to market, then current encryption methods are probably good enough.
The government isn't requiring a retrofit to existing airplanes, either. The USAF won't monitor 121.5MHz after February, but it is still legal to fly with a 121.5MHz ELT.
According to Wikipedia, Fossett was flying a Bellanca Super Decathlon. That's not a homebuilt, it's a certified airplane that was an enhancement of the venerable Citabria...much like the 7ECA Citabria that I instruct in at my "night" job (yes, I'm a fly-by-night instructor, lol).
It is possible that Fossett modified his Decathlon so that it met the requirements to become an experimental airplane, but that still wouldn't have excused him from the requirement for the ELT. The FARs require an ELT in any aircraft -- certified or experimental -- with more than one seat. For example, my airplane is a homebuilt, but because it has two seats, it also has an ELT.
So, if he did not have an ELT installed, "why???" is still a valid question.
I have had the ELT accidentally go off on an airplane I was flying. In my case, a loose bushing in the nosewheel caused the nosewheel to shimmy violently enough to activate the ELT during takeoff. Fortunately, I was taking off from an airport that had a flight service station on the field, they detected the ELT and had the radio direction finding equipment that could follow the ELT signal as I circled the airport, and I was able to land and shut off the ELT before it registered on a satellite. From my own personal experience as a flight instructor (and the example above), I suspect that most false alarms fall into this category: a pothole, nosewheel shimmy or hard landing triggers the ELT, but the pilot didn't notice (tune 121.5 on your aircraft radio before shutting down to prevent this). I doubt very many false alarms are caused by interference.
These occurance of these types of incidents would not change if they switched to the new units, because they'd still get set off and someone would still have to come check it out. It's would just make identification easier.
No, they wouldn't have to come check it out. The data tag encoded in the 406MHz units include registration information which, IIRC, includes a telephone number so that rescue services can call the owner before starting a ramp search.
The ELTs that we currently have on our aircraft work just fine.
Not really. Part of the reason for the switch to 406MHz is because the new units provide two important pieces of information that the 121.5MHz units don't: GPS position information and the registered N-number for the airplane in which the ELT is installed. This means that when an ELT signal is "heard", emergency services don't have to initiate a search to find out if it is a real emergency, if it is in an airplane that was bumped on the ramp or if a pilot or mechanic accidentally hit the "on" switch on an ELT while loading or working on an airplane. Ask any CAP member how many times they've had to run out to the airport to do a ramp search because someone accidentally set off an ELT, and you'll quickly find out why this is a good idea.
It's a software issue, nothing more, so why change it?
Again, not exactly. It *is* a software issue in that the big difference between a 406MHz ELT and a 121.5MHz ELT is the frequency they operate on. However, the 406MHz ELT has the additional hardware to receive a GPS signal, and the hardware to encode the GPS position information in the broadcast signal. And, as any savvy network geek can tell you, the amount of information that can be broadcast in a given carrier signal is a function of the frequency of the carrier. As the carrier frequency increases, so does the amount of data that the radio signal can carry. I don't know how much data the new 406MHz units are supposed to carry, but according to an Air Force search and rescue guy who gave a talk at the local EAA meeting this summer, that is part of the reason for the switch -- the 121.5MHz units didn't have the bandwidth to carry the data tags.
So what if it is not as accurate as the newer technology, that's a choice we make as owners. I don't fly in remote areas... in fact, most of my flights are withing 200 miles of Cincinnati, so if I go down, I'm within a few miles of a population center. CAP can use their ELT Locators to find me.
That's great for you, but there are a number of pilots who *do* fly in remote areas, and the simple fact is that the new ELTs allow SAR personnel to respond more quickly, more easily more effectively and with less risk -- especially to false alarms. It is *much* better for an Air Force Rescue Coordination Center to get a hit on a 406MHz ELT and be able to look up the N-number and therefore telephone number for the owner of the ELT that is going off. Then they can call the owner and have them go shut off the ELT if it is a false alarm, or they can dispatch a rescue mission when they speak to the owner's spouse and find out that the owner was really out flying when the ELT went off.
We don't need an additional "TAX..."Right now, they cost 12x as much!
Yes, but right now, the FAA isn't requiring that we replace our 121.5MHz units, either. The USAF is retiring the satellites that monitor 121.5MHz, but if you don't want to switch, you don't have to! Just be aware that, unless you file a flight plan, it could be awhile before anyone goes looking for you because the satellites won't pick up your ELT. However, since you've already stated that most of your flights are "...within a few miles of a population center" that shouldn't really be a big deal for you, right?
FWIW, I have a 121.5MHz unit installed in my airplane, and I don't plan to upgrade to 406MHz until prices drop a bit. However, I am very seriously looking at the personal locater transmitter beacons as a stop-gap. Some (most?) of them use the same system and signalling as the 406MHz ELTs, and they are much more competitively priced. I could easily carry one in the survival vest I wear when flying outside of my local area. The only downside is that you have to manually activate them, so if I crash and am unconscious, the 121.5MHz ELT is all I have. That's a risk I can live with until the 406MHz ELTs come down a bit in price, however.
nor does Freedom from Search & Seizure exist at the border
Only because "We the People" allow the government to take this stance. The 4th Amendment provides protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure. The courts have interpreted border searches to be "reasonable" but that by no means proves that this is what the Founding Fathers intended.
I've explained this several times on this site...
That doesn't mean that this interpretation of the 4th Amendment is correct -- it just explains why *you* believe it is correct. As *I've* explained several times on this site, I disagree with your interpretation of the 4th Amendment. Unfortunately, since I am just Joe Sixpack rather than a Supreme Court justice, my belief doesn't carry much weight as far as legal interpretation goes...nor, I suspect -- with all due respect -- does yours.
The problem is, when the Bill of Rights was drafted, there was no telephone, no e-mail, not even telegraph. The authors of the Bill of Rights covered any kind of communication that could be used to pass private communications at that time. By extrapolation, it is not unreasonable to assume that, had the Founding Fathers envisioned telephones and e-mail, they would have included them in the 4th amendment as well.
Unfortunately, the Constitution only means what the courts decide it means, and for right now at least, the courts seem to be taking a less strict interpretation than I'd like.
Funny. I can't seem to find the phrase that allows the government to intercept anything crossing the U.S. border in the paragraph above. Could you point it out for me? Thanks!
...at the ISP I used to work for, I received an e-mail from one of my customers. There was no text, no problem description, just a jpeg photograph. A few messages later in the inbox, I found a follow-up e-mail from the same lady:
I just found out that a photo that I was test mailing to myself was sent to abuse@.
Please accept my apologies. It won't happen again.
I'm soooo embarassed......
I may be a BOFH, but no, I won't post the picture:P
I've never played many first person shooters, but my wife thinks it's rather funny to watch me lean left or right in my chair while trying to complete a tight turn in a flight simulator. Basically, the same principle.
I'm a network administrator by day and a flight instructor by night. Aerodynamics has always been a hobby of mine. I'd love to design and build a so-called "amateur-built experimental" airplane, but I don't have the structural engineering down, yet. The moniker comes from yet another hobby of mine (music) -- it's the name of a musical project I started a few years ago.
The only problem I can see with what you are proposing to do is...what happens if the engine(s) quit? While modern airplane engines are pretty reliable, engines do quit once in a while, albeit usually due to something the pilot did wrong. In fact one of my students and I almost got to experience an engine failure at twilight a couple of weeks ago. I pulled the throttle to idle to simulate an engine failure, my student set up for an emergency approach and landing to a field, but took a little too long to run through his emergency checklist and the carburetor started to ice up. When we added power at 1000 feet above ground level (I didn't want to get too low at night -- good thing, too!), the engine didn't make full power or run smoothly for a couple of minutes until all the ice in the carb melted off.
Anyway, back on topic. How many engines are you proposing for your design? If you are planning a single engine driving multiple propellers, then you will have to increase your airspeed to make up for the loss of airflow from the prop wash in the event of an engine failure. If you are planning a multi-engine design, then the loss of a single engine will cause some significant rolling forces as one wing loses lift due to the engine failure (it's already a significant problem on conventional multi-engine airplanes). If you decide to go multiple engines with interconnecting drive trains (as the V-22 Osprey does) you have some additional complexity and weight to deal with.
But these are all engineering details. It's a cool idea, and for every problem, there are, I'm sure, solutions. You just have to work through them:)
In order to help increase lift based on pressure (active pressure differences), I'd place the propeller centers below the wing, rather than above the wing.
I don't think you quite understand the aerodynamics involved. By placing the props underneath the wing, you are actually reducing the pressure on the bottom of the wing, and therefore reducing lift. Bernoulli discovered a long time ago that the faster fluids flow, the lower the pressure. That's why the top of an airplane wing is curved -- the air flowing over the top of the wing reaches the trailing edge of the wing at the same time as the air flowing underneath the wing, but it is traveling a greater distance, and therefore must travel faster. Because it is traveling faster, it is at lower pressure than the air underneath the wing. This pressure difference lifts the airplane towards the area of lower pressure.
Good idea, though. There was, in fact, an airplane that used this very concept (albeit, with the prop *above* the wing to get the aerodynamics correct) to increase the lift a wing could produce: the Custer Channelwing.
But having spent plenty of time at airports (I'm a flight instructor as well as computer geek), a landing airplane is *much, much* quieter to anyone on the ground than an airplane taking off -- especially if the airplane in question is a Cessna 185, 206 or 207. The prop tips on these airplanes reach transonic speeds at full power, and the noise is almost painful to anyone on the ramp. Jets on takeoff can be even worse -- especially fighter jets -- but modern jet engines are getting far less noisy than they used to be.
Also, you don't use thrust reversers until you are on the runway trying to stop, so to people on the ground, the noise from landing is minimal.
Just out of curiousity, and I haven't RTFA yet so maybe the answer is there, but couldn't you vary the pitch of the vanes on the turbine to maintain a constant RPM in varying wind conditions, much the way a constant speed propeller on an airplane works?
There would still be a range of wind speeds for which this would work, i.e., too little wind and the propeller will stall before reaching the optimal RPM as you keep increasing the blade pitch, but it seems like it would work better across a wider variety of wind speeds without requiring the complexity of this new generator.
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Who would you nominate, then?
When the facts don't fit, call names and hurl insults?
/. -- including those moderators you griped about -- are upset by this. It *IS* a Really Big Deal (t.m.) and I'm saddened that we as a nation are so freaking apathetic that it's only a vocal minority who seem to care about it.
I don't give a rip *what* Congress or the Supreme Court said -- the FACTS are written in ink in the Constitution.
We had the same party in the majority in Congress and in the White House, and they saw a chance to make a power grab for the Republican party. Bush having recently stacked the deck with two conservative judges in the Supreme Court just made it more likely that their legacy wouldn't fail the judicial test.
If you had paid attention in history and civics class, however, you would understand why so many people here on
How can his actions, both then and now, possibly be based on his belief that he's right? Before the Senate vote, he stated several times that he would not vote to grant telco immunity in the wiretapping case. Then when push came to shove, he voted for it anyway. Now that he's president, he's putting his seal of approval on wiretapping.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but it looks to me like he wants the power; he just didn't want anyone *else* to have it. Because, you know, he's the Good Guy and will only use it responsibly...cough, cough.
That's a crock.
As long as there are no complications, that is. When my daughter was born, she spent the first five days of her life in the NICU due to a respiratory infection. IIRC, that was around $20K after paying for the birth and related expenses.
While most middle-class Americans can cough up $4K with a little advance planning, a surprise of an additional $20K can be a pretty heavy load.
So, while I really hope your baby is born healthy and there are no unwelcome surprises (I wouldn't wish five days of not knowing whether or not your baby will ever get to go home on anybody), don't fool yourself into thinking that you can plan for all medical expenses by preparing a little ahead of time.
But it is kind of satisfying to see him reveal that he's not quite the guy that so many people see up on that pedestal.
I couldn't disagree more.
I did not vote for Obama, and I have a lot of reservations about having him as president. However, I was hoping that, since he has now been elected and sworn in, he *would* turn out to be the guy that everyone else seemed to think he was. I would be tickled pink to see him prove me wrong, because that would mean I would live in a country I was proud of again. After eight years of Bush in office, I would really like to see the United States return to the ideals that I was always taught America stands for back when I was in school.
Am I surprised that Obama is showing his true colors now that he is in office? No. Am I disappointed, however? Absolutely.
You just described me.
/. and elsewhere, that the Bush administration blatantly abused their power. I would love to have seen Bush impeached and on trial for violating his oath to uphold the Constitution. Because of the direction the Republican party took during the last eight years, I now fall more in line with the Libertarian political ideology than the Republicans'.
I am politically conservative, but have made no secret of the fact, here on
Meh. Just because there exists an obtuse way of doing things in Perl doesn't mean you *have* to do it that way.
:) language of choice. However, despite the fact that I'm comfortable with things I've written in Perl doesn't mean I can always read someone else's code.
I *like* Perl. I've used it since ~2001 and it's my "go to" (not "goto" -- that's obviously bad
However, the same can be said of JavaScript and pretty much any other language I've ever used...with the possible exception of Python, which from my limited experience *always* looks clean, no matter who wrote the code.
Compatability issues between Firefox and IE are hardly Javascript's fault...
The problem with your argument is that a "reasonable amount of time" changes as computer speeds change. Since modern cryptography is based on factoring extremely large numbers, it becomes easier to compute the prime numbers that are used to create the ciphers as computation speeds improve. Therefore what might be "secure" today might be (relatively) trivial to crack in a few years. If it is important to keep your data safe a few years from now, then encryption is probably not good enough. On the other hand, if your data only needs to be kept secure until your product goes to market, then current encryption methods are probably good enough.
The government isn't requiring a retrofit to existing airplanes, either. The USAF won't monitor 121.5MHz after February, but it is still legal to fly with a 121.5MHz ELT.
According to Wikipedia, Fossett was flying a Bellanca Super Decathlon. That's not a homebuilt, it's a certified airplane that was an enhancement of the venerable Citabria...much like the 7ECA Citabria that I instruct in at my "night" job (yes, I'm a fly-by-night instructor, lol).
It is possible that Fossett modified his Decathlon so that it met the requirements to become an experimental airplane, but that still wouldn't have excused him from the requirement for the ELT. The FARs require an ELT in any aircraft -- certified or experimental -- with more than one seat. For example, my airplane is a homebuilt, but because it has two seats, it also has an ELT.
So, if he did not have an ELT installed, "why???" is still a valid question.
I have had the ELT accidentally go off on an airplane I was flying. In my case, a loose bushing in the nosewheel caused the nosewheel to shimmy violently enough to activate the ELT during takeoff. Fortunately, I was taking off from an airport that had a flight service station on the field, they detected the ELT and had the radio direction finding equipment that could follow the ELT signal as I circled the airport, and I was able to land and shut off the ELT before it registered on a satellite. From my own personal experience as a flight instructor (and the example above), I suspect that most false alarms fall into this category: a pothole, nosewheel shimmy or hard landing triggers the ELT, but the pilot didn't notice (tune 121.5 on your aircraft radio before shutting down to prevent this). I doubt very many false alarms are caused by interference.
These occurance of these types of incidents would not change if they switched to the new units, because they'd still get set off and someone would still have to come check it out. It's would just make identification easier.
No, they wouldn't have to come check it out. The data tag encoded in the 406MHz units include registration information which, IIRC, includes a telephone number so that rescue services can call the owner before starting a ramp search.
The ELTs that we currently have on our aircraft work just fine.
Not really. Part of the reason for the switch to 406MHz is because the new units provide two important pieces of information that the 121.5MHz units don't: GPS position information and the registered N-number for the airplane in which the ELT is installed. This means that when an ELT signal is "heard", emergency services don't have to initiate a search to find out if it is a real emergency, if it is in an airplane that was bumped on the ramp or if a pilot or mechanic accidentally hit the "on" switch on an ELT while loading or working on an airplane. Ask any CAP member how many times they've had to run out to the airport to do a ramp search because someone accidentally set off an ELT, and you'll quickly find out why this is a good idea.
It's a software issue, nothing more, so why change it?
Again, not exactly. It *is* a software issue in that the big difference between a 406MHz ELT and a 121.5MHz ELT is the frequency they operate on. However, the 406MHz ELT has the additional hardware to receive a GPS signal, and the hardware to encode the GPS position information in the broadcast signal. And, as any savvy network geek can tell you, the amount of information that can be broadcast in a given carrier signal is a function of the frequency of the carrier. As the carrier frequency increases, so does the amount of data that the radio signal can carry. I don't know how much data the new 406MHz units are supposed to carry, but according to an Air Force search and rescue guy who gave a talk at the local EAA meeting this summer, that is part of the reason for the switch -- the 121.5MHz units didn't have the bandwidth to carry the data tags.
So what if it is not as accurate as the newer technology, that's a choice we make as owners. I don't fly in remote areas... in fact, most of my flights are withing 200 miles of Cincinnati, so if I go down, I'm within a few miles of a population center. CAP can use their ELT Locators to find me.
That's great for you, but there are a number of pilots who *do* fly in remote areas, and the simple fact is that the new ELTs allow SAR personnel to respond more quickly, more easily more effectively and with less risk -- especially to false alarms. It is *much* better for an Air Force Rescue Coordination Center to get a hit on a 406MHz ELT and be able to look up the N-number and therefore telephone number for the owner of the ELT that is going off. Then they can call the owner and have them go shut off the ELT if it is a false alarm, or they can dispatch a rescue mission when they speak to the owner's spouse and find out that the owner was really out flying when the ELT went off.
We don't need an additional "TAX..."Right now, they cost 12x as much!
Yes, but right now, the FAA isn't requiring that we replace our 121.5MHz units, either. The USAF is retiring the satellites that monitor 121.5MHz, but if you don't want to switch, you don't have to! Just be aware that, unless you file a flight plan, it could be awhile before anyone goes looking for you because the satellites won't pick up your ELT. However, since you've already stated that most of your flights are "...within a few miles of a population center" that shouldn't really be a big deal for you, right?
FWIW, I have a 121.5MHz unit installed in my airplane, and I don't plan to upgrade to 406MHz until prices drop a bit. However, I am very seriously looking at the personal locater transmitter beacons as a stop-gap. Some (most?) of them use the same system and signalling as the 406MHz ELTs, and they are much more competitively priced. I could easily carry one in the survival vest I wear when flying outside of my local area. The only downside is that you have to manually activate them, so if I crash and am unconscious, the 121.5MHz ELT is all I have. That's a risk I can live with until the 406MHz ELTs come down a bit in price, however.
nor does Freedom from Search & Seizure exist at the border
Only because "We the People" allow the government to take this stance. The 4th Amendment provides protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure. The courts have interpreted border searches to be "reasonable" but that by no means proves that this is what the Founding Fathers intended.
I've explained this several times on this site...
That doesn't mean that this interpretation of the 4th Amendment is correct -- it just explains why *you* believe it is correct. As *I've* explained several times on this site, I disagree with your interpretation of the 4th Amendment. Unfortunately, since I am just Joe Sixpack rather than a Supreme Court justice, my belief doesn't carry much weight as far as legal interpretation goes...nor, I suspect -- with all due respect -- does yours.
The problem is, when the Bill of Rights was drafted, there was no telephone, no e-mail, not even telegraph. The authors of the Bill of Rights covered any kind of communication that could be used to pass private communications at that time. By extrapolation, it is not unreasonable to assume that, had the Founding Fathers envisioned telephones and e-mail, they would have included them in the 4th amendment as well.
Unfortunately, the Constitution only means what the courts decide it means, and for right now at least, the courts seem to be taking a less strict interpretation than I'd like.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Funny. I can't seem to find the phrase that allows the government to intercept anything crossing the U.S. border in the paragraph above. Could you point it out for me? Thanks!
I just found out that a photo that I was test mailing to myself was sent to abuse@. Please accept my apologies. It won't happen again. I'm soooo embarassed......
I may be a BOFH, but no, I won't post the picture :P
I've never played many first person shooters, but my wife thinks it's rather funny to watch me lean left or right in my chair while trying to complete a tight turn in a flight simulator. Basically, the same principle.
I'm a network administrator by day and a flight instructor by night. Aerodynamics has always been a hobby of mine. I'd love to design and build a so-called "amateur-built experimental" airplane, but I don't have the structural engineering down, yet. The moniker comes from yet another hobby of mine (music) -- it's the name of a musical project I started a few years ago.
:)
The only problem I can see with what you are proposing to do is...what happens if the engine(s) quit? While modern airplane engines are pretty reliable, engines do quit once in a while, albeit usually due to something the pilot did wrong. In fact one of my students and I almost got to experience an engine failure at twilight a couple of weeks ago. I pulled the throttle to idle to simulate an engine failure, my student set up for an emergency approach and landing to a field, but took a little too long to run through his emergency checklist and the carburetor started to ice up. When we added power at 1000 feet above ground level (I didn't want to get too low at night -- good thing, too!), the engine didn't make full power or run smoothly for a couple of minutes until all the ice in the carb melted off.
Anyway, back on topic. How many engines are you proposing for your design? If you are planning a single engine driving multiple propellers, then you will have to increase your airspeed to make up for the loss of airflow from the prop wash in the event of an engine failure. If you are planning a multi-engine design, then the loss of a single engine will cause some significant rolling forces as one wing loses lift due to the engine failure (it's already a significant problem on conventional multi-engine airplanes). If you decide to go multiple engines with interconnecting drive trains (as the V-22 Osprey does) you have some additional complexity and weight to deal with.
But these are all engineering details. It's a cool idea, and for every problem, there are, I'm sure, solutions. You just have to work through them
Ahhh...sorry. I misunderstood the aerodynamics involved ;) You were wanting to make use of a different principle than I thought.
In order to help increase lift based on pressure (active pressure differences), I'd place the propeller centers below the wing, rather than above the wing.
I don't think you quite understand the aerodynamics involved. By placing the props underneath the wing, you are actually reducing the pressure on the bottom of the wing, and therefore reducing lift. Bernoulli discovered a long time ago that the faster fluids flow, the lower the pressure. That's why the top of an airplane wing is curved -- the air flowing over the top of the wing reaches the trailing edge of the wing at the same time as the air flowing underneath the wing, but it is traveling a greater distance, and therefore must travel faster. Because it is traveling faster, it is at lower pressure than the air underneath the wing. This pressure difference lifts the airplane towards the area of lower pressure.
Good idea, though. There was, in fact, an airplane that used this very concept (albeit, with the prop *above* the wing to get the aerodynamics correct) to increase the lift a wing could produce: the Custer Channelwing.
But having spent plenty of time at airports (I'm a flight instructor as well as computer geek), a landing airplane is *much, much* quieter to anyone on the ground than an airplane taking off -- especially if the airplane in question is a Cessna 185, 206 or 207. The prop tips on these airplanes reach transonic speeds at full power, and the noise is almost painful to anyone on the ramp. Jets on takeoff can be even worse -- especially fighter jets -- but modern jet engines are getting far less noisy than they used to be.
Also, you don't use thrust reversers until you are on the runway trying to stop, so to people on the ground, the noise from landing is minimal.
Just out of curiousity, and I haven't RTFA yet so maybe the answer is there, but couldn't you vary the pitch of the vanes on the turbine to maintain a constant RPM in varying wind conditions, much the way a constant speed propeller on an airplane works?
There would still be a range of wind speeds for which this would work, i.e., too little wind and the propeller will stall before reaching the optimal RPM as you keep increasing the blade pitch, but it seems like it would work better across a wider variety of wind speeds without requiring the complexity of this new generator.
LOL!
:)
I stand corrected