Has anyone ever re-attempted this record?
I am interested in doing this and attempting this. Probably most likely with a GO Pro HD camera attached to record everything. Is there a good autopilot that would be able control the gas engine that one could recommend, perhaps with collision avoidance. I think I saw something about sonar detection and collision avoidance for the APM 1.0. 2560 board on the udrones.com store website.
I would be using a 4 channel rc gas engine plane, the gas engine would be modified to have an alternator to charge the batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts_Farm
Replies
It should be much easier to accomplish with todays technology, but perhaps much harder to get permission?
Have you considered Carb heat for icing en route 2 stroke?or four stroke ?You could bleed some exhaust gas around the venturi to keep it warm . How may hours do you expect to take ? are you doing it in one shot a series of steps You could run the engine the recommended number of hours to see the fuel burn then calculate your weight + 30% for head wind if you can get up in the jet stream you can get a 200+ knot push and maby just idle across at altitude you will need a means of leaaning the mixture A transponder or a modified epirb locator beacon and tell the authority what you are doing modify a sat phone with Gps and it will show you where it is and you can control it from home . I think Iridium makes one with data link With a transponder air traffic control would keep track of it maby a series of RCplanes go up en route for in flight fueling
the ideas are limit less Very worthwhile project! Good Luck!
I'd suggest Paparazzi as the autopilot. The APM is cool, but it's nowhere near as sophisticated and mature as Paparazzi.
I use the APM mainly because it has nicer GCS software, uses MAVlink, and runs in windows. But if I were doing some high end stuff like you propose I'd use Paparazzi. The Umarin board in particular is very tiny and light.