The Squamidian Report – Sept. 19 / 15
Online Version
Issue #695
Hi All,
With the busyness of summer now past I've been able to get my little RC
plane out a bit again. One tends to get a bit rusty at controlling
those things but it soon comes back and the old fingers on the controls
soon smooth out and away you go. As stated in the past I do most of my
flying down at the ball field, and I try to go only when there is
little to no wind. A gentle 5 mph wind to an almost weightless RC is
like a hurricane to a 'real' plane. So, given how the winds seem to
work here, that means either first part of the morning or late evening.
Mornings are when there is the least chance of anyone being around but
the sun can be in you eyes if you are standing on or near the in-field.
The sun is behind you in the evening but there is a bigger chance of
there being others around. I usually don't even bother with evenings
but I did try one evening last week and the air was as smooth as glass.
The little plane just seemed to float along, not a ripple. So to that
end I headed down to the field again a couple of days ago in the
evening and low and behold, the ball field was full of people playing
ball. The nerve of them, playing ball on a ball field. Oh well, I went
back the next morning and had the whole place to myself.
One of the many benefits of these little planes is that they use a
small flight battery to power the motor and the flight control
mechanisms. So, they are very quiet and very safe, no gas engine,
no heat, that kind of thing. No problems trying to start finicky little
gas engines, because these planes use electric motors. Assuming that
the equipment is 'bound', you just turn on your controller, plug in
your battery, test your control system and away you go. The 'right' way
to fly is to use a timer that will alert you to when there is only a
couple of minutes of flight time left on the batter. At that point you
would come in for a landing and either switch to a fresh battery (a
charged battery) or you would pack up and go home. Thats the correct
way to do it, but not necessarily how I tend to do it. When I feel I'm
getting close to running down the flight battery I just fly a bit
higher and keep the plane within gliding distance of the ball park
in-field. When the motor stops spinning the propeller, I do a
dead-stick landing on the in-field sand. Once in a while it doesn't
work out so good and the plane goes down in the out field some where
but that just means a little walk through mowed grass and goose poop to
where it landed.
Another benefit of these RC's is that they are relatively inexpensive
and very easy to repair. I haven't crashed or damaged my plane in a
long time, not since I was learning to fly it, but for most damage, all
thats needed is some glue and some tape. Even a broken wing can be
fixed in minutes with the plane ready to fly again before the battery
has finished being re-charged. Mind you, I've got a friend who has so
much glue and tape holding his plane together that its flight
characteristics have been altered. But thats all part of the fun.
Now something different and very cool. Several guys put together a
video depicting the size of our solar system, to scale, where the Earth
is the size of a marble. They used a dry lake bed in order to achieve a
large enough area, several miles wide. Using lighted spheres to depict
each planet and the sun, they then moved each object through its orbit,
in the dark, to visually display the orbits. Like I said, very cool and
well done.
https://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg
doug
****
Have a good one..
the doug
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