Blogs

I am excited to announce that on Friday, February 7th 2014, 3DR Flight Ops SD flew our modified Skywalker Airplane for over 4 hours (4:00:18 to be exact!) and covered a distance of approximately 134km or 83.5 miles.  This is a new personal record for flight time and distance, all accomplished over a few months of planning, building, and testing. Installed in this skywalker was the new Pixhawk Autopilot along with the new digital airspeed sensor, which performed flawlessly for us.

We have been testing some of the new battery technology in different configurations and we think we found the optimal configuration for the Skywalker. I have attached the KMZ and Screenshot of the flight. The tlog is 20+mb so it isn't attached at this time. We optimized for time aloft vs. distance, but we could imagine that a 100 mile flight would be possible with a slightly different flight profile. Note that this flight was performed in accordance to all DIY rules for safety, including a safety pilot in the loop and remaining within LOS at all times. The figure 8 pattern is exactly 1 mile in length, and also note that the kmz file only counts the mileage for the AUTO portion of the flight, with the remaining 2.5 miles being in FBW, Loiter, etc.

During the 4 hour flight we were able to capture some great air to air shots with our Y6:

Skywalker%204%20hr.kmz