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Permalink Reply by Wanabigaplane on May 13, 2012 at 2:52am

Hi John,

We, www.canberrauav.com/, were donated with a Mugin by  http://www.cybertechuav.com.au/ from Western Australia.

I made these comments about the Mugin on another thread.

"We are flying the Mugin from 2000 ft. With 4.5 kilos on the nose just for  balance, all up weight of 16 kilos, it requires a lot of speed for its lift. The slowest comfortable speed is around 100 km/hr, wide open throttle level flight is about 180 km/hr. This thing uses up the field at a great rate, and I have to work hard to keep up with it. Now, I consider myself an experienced, but ordinary weekend hack pilot of a wide range of nitro planes. We have a perfect 90 metre long, 9 metre wide, artificial strip visitors drool over, and it takes all my skill to get the Mugin down on it safely without running off the end. see http://www.cmac.org.au/about.htm  The plane is well built, but in a manner that makes field repairs difficult. A few rolls of duct tape will just not do. The aluminium tubes are a close fit, and bending one would be hard to patch around. We cannot source spare tubing anywhere - and we have tried. The nose undercarriage is not all that strong, and has such a long moment that it is very vulnerable to not the best landings, or even running into obstacles at take off speed."

Ours is probably an earlier version. I would be interested to see how the later models, like yours might be, turn out.

The CASA regulations take a bit of interpretation. My understanding is that if the UAV is used for profit of any kind, it comes under CASA regulations for UAVs, and all the red tape you can imagine applies. Otherwise, CASA classifies it as a model aircraft, and says the MAAA is responsible body. But the MAAA are only concerned with models flown at MAAA recognised fields. I am sure alot of odd regulations do apply, but it is up to you to find out. I understand changes are are on the way, and what you determine today, may not apply tomorrow.

Best of luck.  Jack.

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Permalink Reply by John Cousins on May 13, 2012 at 4:28am

Many thanks Jack!

 

Luckily I have a whole salt lake to land the thing on!

Seriously though, I am a little surprised by the lowest comfortable speed being 100kph! Looks like it might be a bit of a handful!

Sounds like you have the same interperetation of the rules as me. I'll just treat it as a model aircraft and I should be fine.

I'm actually visiting cybertech soon. They invited me down ages ago but work commitments have made it impossible.

According to their website they offer full UAV pilot training so it will be interesting to see how much I have to do to become certified... I used to fly light aircraft... but that was over 12 years ago!

 

I have purchased the newer version of the Mugin... but it doesn't look that much different. I'll post some pictures on DIY drones when she arrives.

 

Cheers for the info.

John

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