Flying through the world of aeronautics

The V1 of this aircraft is finally out. I have a planned V2 and V3 which will be released soon. Here are some stats: Top speed: 43 Km/h Ceiling: Above restricted ceiling - cannot test Turning radius: About 2 meters Stall speed: currently undetermined, but about 7-10 km/h Stall characteristics: Nose pitches down, recovers quickly.  AUW: Currently undetermined Propulsion: 10x4.5 propeller, 750 kV motor, 18A ESC, 5200 mAh Cruising speed: Currently undetermined, but about 15 km/h Cruising Amp Draw: 4.2 amps Amp Draw at Stall Speed: 3.6 amps Amp Draw at Full Throttle: 13 amps Aspect Ratio: About 2.6 Glide Slope (Post micro stall recovery): 7 meters Credit to Alexander Frigault for writing a stabilization code on an arduino board for this aircraft, he will release the code soon as well. The accelerometer is an ADXL345 board. The chevron wing extenders allow me to pull the main wing back to the point where it allows the aircraft to provide some pitch stabili...

So in the last post we concluded that the wing extenders weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing. So, what are they good for? Why is the wing extender still in use? The video goes into detail, enjoy!

Stability testing: Something I could have done two months ago in two hours but for some reason didn't do it. So I finally decided to do them, and here are my results. I'll start with the aircraft (Abi) without the vertical stabilizers. I could probably just give you a video and let you decide for yourself, but there's no reason to waste that much time. There's only one conclusion It was a disaster.  The wing extenders barely helped with yaw stability. I felt like i was in Tokyo drift trying to fly that plane around. Once the wind died down yaw stabilized a little, but was still off. It's obviously better than a pure plank flying wing, but obviously still very bad.  After i slapped on some vertical stabilizer, it was perfect, stable, and everything I could ask for. Yaw was stable. Roll, pitch, all stable. Here's something else; I'm still in High school, so i'm not very "in-depth" of aeronautics. Some things i still do not know h...

Long story short, i'm back with more frequent posts. I decided at the beginning of the summer that if I couldnt find an internship, I would work as hard as I could in order to gain more experience. This way, I could also get a head start on my science fair project. So far, I still don't know how I will word it, or how I will present it, but here is what I have so far. I'm designing two aircraft to support in the duties of people like firemen, and policemen, maybe even EMT's. One is a larger aircraft, designed to take air at the same time, or before the service men take road. It currently has a wing span of 80~ inches, an estimated flight time of 50 minutes, and a flight range (one way) of 25 miles. The range is probably better than expected, since I calculated the data using a cruise speed of 30 mph. I also occasionally cut the throttle (this thing glides beautifully), and that might increase the range, but for now the range is pretty short, and needs to be i...

Well I got it to hover thanks to a certain individual that goes by the name of "Ran D. St Clair." On the rcgroups VTOL forums. Picture for now, once I get the PID values working I'll upload a video.

So I've been having a blast designing my VTOL flying wing. The guys over at rcgroups have the best advice I could find, and the software made by happysundays over at the vtols form (openAeroVTOL) is great. VTOL flying wing in hover mode.  So here's what I have SO FAR.  I took off the wings for the hover test because I wanted to progress one addition at a time. If hovermode had  a sudden error, I might have ended up damaging the wings.  I'm writing this at night, so I am getting ready to shut the lights off and finally get some rest, but here are some observations I took in from this nights hover tests.  Takeoffs on uneven cement ground resulted in pitch oscillation, while takeoffs on even grass resulted in a smooth takeoff that I had to stop, and land immediately afterwards because it was banking. I did not make an attempt at trying to balance it.  The pitch oscillation might have been caused by a really highly pitch P vaullue, ev...

So my first experiences with this plane was great. It could glide, fly, roll, loop, it could even vertically take off. At around this time i was really into two things in flight. Vertical flight/quadcopters, and aerial filming. I worked on aerial filming first. The goal was clear: a stable, slow flying aircraft. So i worked on the wing first. The outcome was pretty awesome. Read up on the Flite Test article i wrote below. The display of the new wing, and tests. The bloody wonder is such a versitile plane, it has a great glide slope and its awesome with acrobatics. It can do everything. I wanted to just glide, and to improve on that. With my father pressuring me and saying "aerobatics wont get you anywhere", i started a very short journey. With the original build, flaps are not availible. I built a second wing for my plane that is interchangable with the first wing. The second has flaps, and also, it has a larger wing chord for more lift, also a MUCH larger airfoi...