A Grey Drizzly Day

We’ve had drizzle all day today and we never did see the sun. It was a day for staying indoors in the warm and dry. I’ve been building, but not as much as I wanted to. In the picture above, you can see my newly finished rudder which is full of more holes than a Swiss cheese. It just needs a final rub down with sandpaper to take the rough edges off and then it can be covered. It now weighs a whole 9.6g, which is a saving of 2.8g off of the solid version. It does make you wonder if it’s worth it, bearing in mind how much time and effort it took me to save almost 3g, but taking weight off the rear end is going to help a lot with the tail heavy balance. It does represent a 22.5% weight saving on the rudder, though, which sounds a lot better when you put it like that.

All I need to do now is finish off the wing fixing and I can start on the covering. Then there’s the slight matter of water proofing the foam wings to tackle. If I could just find the time to get on with it, then I could be finished in no time, but life is not helping me out at the moment. It’s more a case of it will be finished when it’s finished.

There’s no more November flying left now and it seemed to bring me nothing but rain. I managed a couple of weeks in a row last week, but my overriding memory of November is of everything being a bit damp. It’s supposed to get colder next week, so maybe December will herald in the freezing weather?

Whatever happens, I’ve still got some building to do, so I had better get on with it and work out the final evolution of the wing fixing structure. I’ve also been doing some calculations and I might try running with a smaller motor and battery in an attempt to bring the weight and wing loading down while keeping the power to weight ratio in the 1:1 region. That’s going to need some simulator time to get right, which is what I used to do in the old days before I had a job. I really want to see this aircraft fly now, but these last parts are dragging out over a long period of time.

Seriously Iffy Weather

I nearly didn’t go flying this morning, but, as you can see from the picture above, I made it two weeks running despite the challenging weather. The picture doesn’t really tell the whole story. First, we had torrential rain from 6am to 8am, which meant that everything was flooded. Then the forecast had another weather front coming through in early afternoon, but with a high chance of heavy showers sandwiched between the two weather fronts that were going to dump a month’s worth of rain on us in about an hour. The sunny conditions between the two weather systems sealed the deal and I figure that it was worth the risk of getting the bike out and going flying. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had got wet, but, as it turned out, I got lucky. However, the conditions were far from ideal as it was really windy. It was a classic, “it’s only sunny because the wind has blown all the clouds away”. It got worse as the morning went on, but one minute it could be completely calm, then really turbulent strong winds arrived without any warning and were throwing the aircraft around the sky, even when I had the gyro on. It was a challenging morning to say the least, but I’m glad I went.

I was on my own for most of the morning, probably because I was the only one feeling lucky enough to brave the weather. There was a teenage boy with a DJI Mavic part way through the morning and then a family with another drone towards the end, but that was it. I was there on my own most of the time. The conditions weren’t really conducive to turning the gyro off and flying on expert mode, but I gave it a bit of a go with the Mustang on some of the flights. I actually managed a really fantastic flick roll and spin on one occasion, but couldn’t get the aircraft to repeat the aerobatics when I tried again. It’s a funny old plane the Mustang, because it will spin round half a turn and then just stop. Considering how unstable it is in the roll axis and how I’m spending most of my time rolling left and right just trying to get it level, it’s got a definite thing against spinning.

I had my usual seven flights today and my three suspect batteries from last week were a bit of a mixed bag. The first two were definitely down on power. The first did about 8 minutes with reduced thrust, the second slightly less, but then the third battery obviously had a higher voltage as I could see the motor revs were increased and the Mustang was flying faster. I think I got about 10 minutes with that pack, doing lots of aerobatics, so that one must have just been a charging error last week. The other four packs all gave me just under 15 minutes with good thrust, so I still have lots of air time in them.

That’s about all there is to say, really, as it was a “just keep the aeroplane in the air” sort of a day.

I still haven’t done much serious building of my new aerobatic plane over the last week, which is very bad of me. However, I have made progress with the Micro:Bit quadcopter as I’ve finally got the low pass filtering working on the accelerometer data. I should try that out with the stabilisation algorithm tonight, but there’s a bit of a delay introduced by the filter which might be a bit interesting. Whether this thing is actually going to fly or not, I have no idea, but I’ve been working on it for so long now that I need some kind of a resolution.

Well, everything is flooded, so let’s hope it all dries up by next week rather than freezes. I don’t fancy cycling on ice, so that could put paid to my flying activities for a bit. November has been a bit of a wash out for flying and we’re moving into the building more than flying phase of the year. At least, I know I should be doing some building, but I never seem to be able to find the time.

Remembrance Day 2022: Spitfire, Mustang, Corsair

It was a murky old morning, but a flying one at last! I flew in clear glasses for the first couple of flights, which doesn’t happen often. That’s how dark and dull it was.

I almost had my usual seven flights with the Mustang this morning, but three of my packs aren’t behaving themselves. They probably needed a bit more exercise after their three week lay-off. The first one required full throttle for the whole flight and needed coaxing around the sky on much reduced thrust until it gave up after about 5 minutes. The next one didn’t even make the climb-out on the launch before it cut out on me and then my last flight of the day was around 10 minutes, but, again, with reduced thrust. Also, at one point I nearly had a dog try and eat the plane after it landed. It was just one of those days.

Anyway, part way through the morning I saw two groups of people arrive while I was flying. The first two definitely had a drone in a box and I thought it looked like the other two had something similar. Then, I’m flying my Mustang around when I see something else in the sky. “Hey, wait a minute, that’s a Spitfire!”. They had the Eachine versions of the Spitfire and Corsair which match my Mustang. So, when the cannon went off to mark 11 o’clock on Remembrance Sunday, we had a Spitfire, Mustang and Corsair in the sky.

The Spitfire is definitely a bit faster than the Mustang, with the Corsair the slowest. We’re not sure why that is as they all have the same power plant, but maybe the Spitfire is just more clean aerodynamically? Whatever the reason, it was a lot of fun mixing it with the two other warbirds. They were also flying them on expert mode a lot of the time, which is impressive. I had a bit of a practice on intermediate mode with the gyro on before they arrived, then switched to flying more gyro off as there was virtually no wind today. It definitely makes a difference if you’re not trying to battle the wind at the same time as the aircraft. I managed to do a really fantastic double turn spin, closely followed by “Ground! Quick! Recover”. It was fine, really. For most aircraft I wouldn’t call that recovery at all close to the ground, but this little Mustang is so twitchy that I would usually allow a bit more height. I just saw it going around the second spin and thought, “let’s do two”. Then there’s the “how do I recover exactly?” thought that comes along immediately after. Luckily, muscle memory is quite a powerful thing and it all just happens about 10 metres above the ground.

My final landing was a bit of a tip stall into the ground, though. The pack wasn’t giving me full power, I was coaxing it around the sky and trying to follow a Spitfire and Corsair, but then the power cut unexpectedly while I was in expert mode and I had to land without the gyro to help me. It dropped the left wing about 50cm above the ground, so it didn’t do any damage.

I did try to take some photographs of the other aircraft, but my camera isn’t very good.

This is the Spitfire (I think)

And this is a better picture of a Corsair

Well, that was fun! However, I really need to be flying a proper sized plane, so I’ve got some building to do tonight. Let’s hope the weather has given up on that 40 days and 40 nights of rain thing.

Where is all the Rain Coming From?

The rain coming from the sky again and we had a downpour of epic proportions this morning. In fact, it went on for all night, all morning, then most of the rest of the day. Everywhere is now flooded and flying is nothing but a distant memory.

I really haven’t done very much this week. I’ve made some holes in the rudder, but not got any further. Too many other events are getting in my way a present and I’ve lost track completely. The only other thing I’ve done is to have a bit of a refresher course on digital signal processing so that I can filter the accelerometer data from my Micro:Bit quadcopter experiment. That’s another thing I need to get back into as everything has taken a bit of a hit this last week. The trouble is, I don’t think next week is going to be any better as we’re running a conference for the next five days. That’s always guaranteed to make your spare time evaporate.

I should have done some work on my simulator, as that’s the only flying I’m going to be doing for the foreseeable future.

At some point it’s just going to have to stop raining, surely?