Hi Cory,

I'm going to be working on a UAV project at the U of MN this spring, but I'm not a professor. Are you a student there?

Curt.

I honestly don't know how the U of MN compare to other aerospace programs. I know they have sharp professors and a lot of sharp students. They do a variety of aerospace related student projects. In my opinion the biggest factor is that you get out in proportion to the effort you put in, and a person can be successful where ever they find themselves if they work hard and make the most of their opportunities. Who knows what the job market will look like in a couple years (hopefully things will have improved) but I do know that Honeywell hires a lot of grads from the U and they are local. There's a branch of Lockheed Martin down in Eagan, and their's Cirrus up in Duluth which is a really slick company. They like to hire out of the U (and other local colleges) because it can be hard to attract people from warmer climates to come up and work in Minnesota and even harder to get people to move up to Duluth ...

Your profile says you are from MN, so if you live in the twin cities or visit here once in a while, maybe once the weather warms up a bit I could show you my project in action (assuming our airframe survives our ocean demos next week in HI.)

Hi Corey,

The demos went pretty well, although we did have a couple issues. On the good side, we did a 35 minute autonomous flight entirely over water (including launch and recovery.) All the autonomous systems, the motor, the airframe, the launcher all performed beautifully. On the down side, we had a rougher landing (I guess that's expected in the open ocean) and cracked one of our seals leading to salt water contacting our speed controller. That fried the speed controller and we were done for the day. We also had crappy video because we were forced to use our backup video receiver. We still have no idea what happened to our primary, and we are beginning to wonder if it didn't make it through security at the airport or something??? We have no evidence of that though, and everything else went through, so we really don't know, other than we didn't have it in Hawaii, and we haven't found it here now that we are home.

Yeah, I think our stuff is checked carefully by hand! Imagine a big pelican case stuffed full of eletronics, tools, power supplies, RC gear, and all kinds of junk like that. It probably stands out just a little bit from your typical bag full of clothes and shoes.

The guy that lost the stuff was flying from Ancorage to HI, so he didn't go through MSP. That's a good suggestion though, I wonder if he could all the Ancorage folks and see, presumably they would be smaller and have a better chance of locating something like that?

On the subject of tans: we had a deluge all but one day there ... massive amounts of rain, overcast skies, high winds. One day the rain let up, the wind lay down for a couple hours, but the sun did not come out. We might have seen a few brief peeks of the sun the entire week I was there. It was supposedly a once in 30 year rain event ... the power even went out in our hotel for half a day (Marriott in Waikiki so it was a big high rise hotel.)