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Buttcoin purse posted:The large amount of regular ordnance might have all missed, though, whereas you might have thought this would be extremely accurate, what with the human guiding it in all the way.. This weekend I happened to see some videos about the Ohka in TV and they mentioned that 14% of them hit. That's not a good number, but as far as WW2 era bombs go they were probably highly accurate. And since I believe the japanese didn't have guided bombs unlike the germans I can't think of any other way they could have attempted anti-ship strikes in practice. Even if it was wasted effort overall.
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Oct 4, 2015 17:22
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With my experience of trying to spot other gliders while flying I would not be feeling good about my chances with a drone. Flarm is pointing me to the direction of the long-winged white plane, and I can't see a thing.
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Oct 9, 2015 19:51
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vessbot posted:https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10201499889632787&id=247514375367214 That's an interesting method. And at least it seems safer than helicopter towing that I have heard some people talk about.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:14
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'Solar storm' grounds Swedish air traffic The solar storm caused problems for civilian radar systems and ATC was unable to see the planes on their radars.
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Nov 4, 2015 23:59
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Godholio posted:It doesn't say he dodged it, it says it missed. Just because he reacted doesn't mean that maneuver had anything to do with the miss. That may have been a RPG, but this BBC article says that the Sinai Province jihadist group has shot down an army helicopter with a SAM.
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Nov 8, 2015 20:37
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Dannywilson posted:loving hell, was was hoping to post some Alaskan aviation goodness on page 907, but goddamn, there is no way I can beat that. Your only chance of topping him would be to post clips from the Big Rocks & Long Props videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUP8oD6u708
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Nov 29, 2015 20:50
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Vitamin J posted:Sup. Sure thing. The first amendment is about a few things, actually. Speech is one of them. Another is religion. But what we're talking about is the freedom of the press. Basically as the supreme court has ruled, if a person has a right to be in a location, they have the right to take a photograph from that location. This means that since I can fly in an airplane over your house, I can take photos from that airplane while above your house. I can also use a drone to do the same as long as the drone goes where I can go and I don't use it in a way that would constitute trespassing if the picture were taken by hand. But at what height does the airspace above someone's backyard become a location where you aren't allowed to be in?
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Jan 7, 2016 18:13
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Vitamin J posted:Supreme court case law says something like a landowner owns as much airspace as they can reasonably use or need. They can install a large tower for instance. Also if air traffic interferes with their use of the land then they can have that traffic diverted. The case in question involved a farmer where a new airport was built close by and sometimes the planes would fly less than 80ft above his property, scaring his livestock and causing problems for his business and livelihood. The court ruled that the air traffic had to remain above 83ft above his property. Sounds like homeowners need to get drones so they can claim their airspace before the peeping toms invade.
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Jan 7, 2016 23:42
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Boomerjinks posted:View from outside the plane. Looks like the pilot does this a lot. Jumpplane and towplane pilots probably have a tendency to remove any unneeded meters from the landing pattern.
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Feb 28, 2016 17:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:What is a core competency, though? The definition changes significantly over time. At one point, Ford would have considered rubber production and tire manufacture a core competency. At this point, that's ridiculous. There's a huge non-survivor bias to this type of analysis, as well. Nobody concurrently looks at companies that gave up some once-considered core competencies and were successful. I think it boils down to using the better product. If some day a company comes to Boeing showing their carbon nanotube wing they are churning out of their factory for competitive prices, it's the day Boeing should stop manufacturing wings. Just because manufacturing wings is annoying and requires a lot of effort, money and employees; it's no reason to try to push it to someone else and hope everything works out okay.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:49
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In an oligopoly with extremely high costs of entry, how does a new entrant develop a superior product? With difficulty. Start small with RC plane wings, move up to drones and small planes. Or wind turbines, I've got the understanding from somewhere that one of the sail plane manufacturers was actually a wind turbine blade manufacturer as their main industry.
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Mar 31, 2016 20:33
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Where's the seat with belts? How the hell are you supposed to do your work if you hit some turbulence?
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Apr 4, 2016 22:22
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Eej posted:Sorry if I missed this earlier but I just saw this: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/teen-fights-for-the-right-to-strap-guns-to-drones Wouldn't it be easier to get ATF to regulate this. My understanding from reading older posts from this kind of cases is that if you have electrically actuated gun you have built a machine gun and it's jail for you. Unless you own a machine gun, in which case go hog wild.
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Jun 8, 2016 16:31
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I bet it takes more than 7 minutes to drag the plane in and out of that parking lot.The sad truth of planes, you can never land them in the right spot.
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Aug 28, 2016 23:57
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Sagebrush posted:good point. now it's not cool at all that he commutes to work in a homemade airplane Well of course it's cool, I'm just against making silly, groundless justifications for it. It should be enough reason that driving behind your neighbour to work every day was crushing your soul. In fact, an integral part of my plans for hotshot IT-industry startup is waterfront office, house and ATOL 650 LSA. That's the only finalized part of my plans. Looking for angel investors!
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Aug 29, 2016 16:39
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hobbesmaster posted:A 13 man version of this couldn't use a BRS. What is the real limit for BRS? What are the heaviest loads that are airdropped? Murgos posted:Using a gas or diesel engine to power an electric motor is very efficient (energy wise) and works really well. Pretty much every large ship or train uses this scheme (more recently hybrid cars). But while it's energy efficient it's not size or weight efficient. I'm wondering how much weight could be saved if the turbine didn't need to be able to lift the copter, just keep it in level flight. Takeoff would be done battery-assisted. Admittedly planes and copters normally operate much closer to their max power, so there wouldn't be nearly us much benefit as with cars.
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Aug 30, 2016 17:34
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Enourmo posted:Yeah, the tradeoff for controlability is safety. Airplanes and traditional helicopters can safely land from altitude even with a total powerplant failure; what happens if the battery fails while this thing's flying? Oops, you drop like a stone because you have no wings and can't autorotate like a copter can. Linedance posted:Ah, didn't realize that was the case with how multi rotors worked. Carry on then! I'm thinking that with a multicopter, especially with something like the Volocopter that has so many rotors, it would be quite simple to split the rotors into two completely separate systems. Two sets of rotors and motors with two sets of cabling and two batteries, controlled by two separate control systems that doesn't necessarily even have to be aware of the existance of the other system. They would try to control the copter by themself, there would just be some "turbulence in the air" caused by the other set of rotors. Up to this point I don't we would introduced much inefficiency either, unless you need to have reduced the battery voltage. Behind the batteries could be separate generators, which might cause extra weight. How much do two 10 kW generators weight compared to a single 20 kW? There would probably be only a single turbine powering the generators, but the systems aren't electrically connected so they shouldn't be able to affect each other adversily, as long as a battery doesn't blow up and take the other with it.
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Aug 30, 2016 22:57
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PittTheElder posted:It feels really simplistic to just say 'replace mechanical complexity with computer, then it's easy to make it flyable for anyone!'. That complexity doesn't actually go away, it just moves into software. And honestly we know a lot less about properly engineering our software than we do engineering our hardware. I'd say the difference is actually significant. Fundamentally, mechanical complexity is something thousands of mechanics have to deal with monthly, where as software complexity is something the manufacturer has to take care of once. Mechanical system has to be checked constantly for tolerances, vibration and who knows what. And you can expect those to be growing and have to determine when they've grown too much. I have minor experience of this maintaining the gliders in my club. Those L'Hotellier balls are my annual bane. The software on the other hand you can expect to behave the same way it was designed, it doesn't just change some time in the future. Sure, faults may crop up in the underlying computer, but you run some system check to find them. Give the software a million different input sets and check that the output for every one of them is as expected. Of course new issues may crop up too. Maybe the mechanical system exhibits unexpected wear, so you end up adding pages to the maintenance manual and all those mechanics will have something new to check regularly. Maybe there is some corner case that the software doesn't handle correctly. The manufacturer creates fixed software, the mechanics install the updates and then they don't have to be concerned with it anymore, just wait for the next fix for some other issue. The multicopter still have some mechanical systems, but they are much simpler and could be easier to check. Maybe just "when you inject X amps of current to a motor the rotor should turn at Y±‰ RPM. If not, replace."
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Aug 31, 2016 00:04
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xergm posted:If he'd have gotten rid of all the I'm not actually sure it would have glided any further, just slower. Less stored energy if there are no passengers. In gliders we often carry up to 200 liters of water ballast, especially during competition flights. The theory is that the plane will glide the same distance, but you can glide at faster speed.
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Oct 21, 2016 00:33
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Flight testing for fighters must be fun. I imagine you need to put the plane in any possible hosed up situation and then figure out how to recovery. I remember hearing stories about flight testing of some finnish trainer(?) where the plane ended up in flat spin and the only way to recover was for one of the pilots to climb on the wing.
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Oct 30, 2016 18:27
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Jealous Cow posted:
Never go above 1000ft, stay on the top of the highest hill in the area.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:36
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You are all forgetting a major advantage of bikes, they are much safer for everyone else. That's why all youths should be given access to 1000cc superbikes before they ever get behind the wheel, to weed out the craziest individuals. Few years ago a finnish car magazine did a listing of all bike fatalies over the year with descriptions of the accidents. There were something like 29 fatalities and all but one were a biker or passenger. The sole standout was an elderly pedestrian who had been crossing the street from between cars and was hit by a bike. He was at fault for that accident.
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Jan 20, 2017 20:43
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BurgerQuest posted:Wow. One of my worst fears is a propeller breaking off and coming right through the fuselage at me. I too have the irrational fear whenever I'm right on the side of spinning propeller. And then on 2015 a tow plane our club was renting lost two out of three propeller blades during a tow flight, so suddenly it doesn't seem that irrational.  
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Mar 17, 2017 18:32
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The Locator posted:So here's an interesting plane with the engines (all 12 of them) in a location that is constantly trying to push the nose down I imagine. Do people try to add weights on the RC planes to make them maneuver more realistically? That looked far too nimble as do almost all RC planes. I think the only one that looked correct was the large RC jet someone linked recently.
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Apr 18, 2017 19:15
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I've been on few flights with a friend and his father-in-law. Since Cessnas are limited in lavatories an elderly man must be prepared, so he has made his own bottle and tubing setup. Seems to work. As a glider pilot peeing in bags should be a second nature, but I must admit I have never been able to do it. Maybe my penis is just too small to manage peeing inside a tiny cabin while reclining and strapped in 5-point safety belt. 
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May 10, 2017 23:22
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Platystemon posted:Surely they can’t just lengthen the runway. Yeah, no practical way to do that. It drops of a cliff on both ends. http://www.sainthelenaaccess.com/news/wp-content/tn3/0/DSC_1686.jpg http://www.sainthelenaaccess.com/news/wp-content/tn3/0/End-of-Runway-29.11.14.jpg
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May 16, 2017 18:34
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Inacio posted:Where there's a will I considered that option, but those cliffs looked so steep it might make the pillars unpractically tall. And I'm not sure if that would help with the windshear anyway. From some earlier post I got the impression that a plane needs to be some distance inland from the cliff edge before it can land, so it doesn't matter how much the runway has been extended in that direction. The extension would only help at the stopping end of runway. And stopping a plane on a bridge over a cliff and then trying to turn it around doesn't sound like something I'd want to do as a pilot. But I must admit it would make an amazing video when one of those 737s missjudged the turn and tumbled down the cliff.
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May 17, 2017 17:35
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INTJ Mastermind posted:These man-sized quad-copters are literally death traps. Since there's no way it would survive the failure of a single motor, having four on board just quadruples your risk of failure. I wonder how the impact velocity of a 25 ft free fall (likely landing upside down on your face) compares to a bad (but survivable) auto-rotation? I've wondered, if the motors were powerful enough could it be possible to stop the opposite motor and start it turning the opposite direction fast enough to balance the failed motor.
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Oct 17, 2017 15:30
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TheFluff posted:Swedish air force did the yearly christmas tree formation flight over Stockholm today. Unusually big formation this year - 16 aircraft from the 7th and 17th air wings. An unusually large formation, you say. 16 aircraft. As in one more than the Finnish Air Force independence day formation from a week ago. God drat you Sweden   https://twitter.com/FinnishAirForce/status/938372290126995456
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Dec 13, 2017 22:40
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The Locator posted:Now, if there was a high speed rail line (lol at anyone ever building those here) that could get me there in 2-3 hours, that would be a very viable option since the time at both ends spent in the train terminal would only add an hour or so total, so your time spent overall would probably be in the favor of high speed rail. You realize that's an obnoxiously long time for train travel. I have often arrived on the station 5 minutes or less before departure and I just hop right in. I hardly ever arrive more than 15 minutes in advance.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:17
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Good for him, he made it all the way back. Although that does not look like the usual landing approach. Not all gliders have been as lucky, some have had to choose the nearby lakes as their landing spot.
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Jul 20, 2018 09:17
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Plinkey posted:Yeah, is pulling into the grass normal to slow down on a glider? Well that is pretty normal, easiest way to leave the landing strip. If you stop on the strip you would then have to get off the plane and start manhandling the glider, and that would take few extra minutes.
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Jul 20, 2018 15:32
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vessbot posted:I can't find the video now on FB or Youtube, but I bullshit you not I came across a video the other day where they literally connected the wings of 2 T-6es with a chain and flew formation acro like that... don't know why I didn't post it here then. Compared to that, airplane waterskiing is laying-in-a-bed-inside-a-bank-vault safe... That reminded me of a story my gliding instructor had told, how he had been part of a aerobatic demonstration with three gliders ages ago. Because the gliders were different types they tried to equalize their performance by putting water ballast in the wing tanks. They couldn't fill the tanks completely, so the water had room to slosh around. The lesson learned was not to do aerobatics with water ballast. IIRC, they had tried to do parallel loops and all planes went out of control in different directions.
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Nov 5, 2018 18:13
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shame on an IGA posted:The vast majority of noise complaints at every airport are from the same one or two insane busybodies who call dozens of times every day The airfield for my gliding club has couple known complainers, one of them complaining also other matters like racing events. I think one failed official complaint cost him 500€, another one 1500€. We assumed he would stop doing it with such track record, but no. The club president was meeting with some county officials and this person came up in the talks. One official remarked that has complaining as a hobby. And as with all hobbies, it is allowed to cost money.
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Dec 23, 2018 21:30
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smackfu posted:What’s a failed complaint? I guess the more correct term is an appeal against something. Previous one was against the environmental permit of the air field, the latest one is against new aircraft hangars. The appeal reaches some level of court or county bureaucracy, where it is deemed invalid, with a fee stacked on top of it.
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Dec 27, 2018 14:59
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PT6A posted:Worse than that is when you have aircraft that are off by one letter, or aircraft that end with the same letters in a different order. My club has -693 and -963, LS-4 and LS-7 respectively. At least the "bigger is bigger" mnemonic is simple.
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Mar 4, 2019 20:10
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Considering the outcome of the VW scandal, this should end up with quite a few jail sentences for Boeing management. But has the VW treatment been unusually severe? I couldn't find info about sentences with Ford Pinto. Maybe certification should be outsourced. EAA certifies Boeing planes, FAA certifies Airbuses, either of them certifies manufacturers from remaining countries. The national agency is under too much pressure and influence to be trusted.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:46
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Nerobro posted:Spreading the load along the spar is something that can be done with, or without a fuselage. If you want an extreme example the Rutan Voyager did it to an extreme where the wing tips dragged the ground on takeoff with full tanks. Flying wings, due to their close coupling, can lose a lot of their potential advantages due to tight CG requirements, and needed control forces. If "pure wings" were so efficient, we'd see more competition sailplanes with "just a wing". There's been a couple, but they're not in the current flock. Continuing the flying wing discussion, a Horten H.III seems like a good argument for the possibility of flying wings. It's about as pure as flying wings get, quite a few were built and they were used in gliding competitions. For competition flying wings, performance is important but so is ease of flying. During my glider training one of our instructions adviced us never to buy a flapped glider from the 70s. I suspect at least part of the reason is taking the performance too far. I remember reading about how they were raising performance during that era, but that ended up making the gliders more exhaustive to fly which ended up reducing the competitive performance. My clubmate used to own a SZD-55 which is propably a remnant of that era. He is an experienced flier but he still has ended up in sudden spins during thermalling. He told about a one harrowing time when he again went to a sudden spin, immediately tried to tighten his belt, but do to the stupid belt design he instead unbuckled himself. So there he is, trying to recover from a spin while holding on to the belt with his left hand.
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May 4, 2019 01:59
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Charles posted:So it was me playing Flight Simulator. You thought you were playing around in a game, but all along you were remotely operating a commercial international flight. :ender's game:
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Jun 16, 2019 09:50
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Reminder that turbulence can always get worse: https://onemileatatime.com/turbulence-video/ I too had a fun experience yesterday, during the beginning of glider tow. We were probably no more than 50 meters above the runway when we hit some kind of rotor. My glider suddenly shoots up, I push forward to get back level with and lift up from the seat and hit me head on the canopy. Then pull the stick to not fall below tow plane, followed by another trip up high and another hit of the canopy. I was desperately trying to stay behind the tow plane while pulling my belts tighter. I probably should have released the tow rope, but all my concentration was on staying behind the tow plane so I wasn't able to evaluate whether I was on a safe release altitude, and search for tow hook release. Afterwards the tow pilot told he too was throwing the stick left and right to try to stay level. He also considered releasing the rope from his end. Another example why I should have an action cam with me, so I could later evaluate what happened and my response.
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Jun 18, 2019 12:59
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