134km/83.5 Mile, 4 hour flight with our Skywalker

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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:

 

 

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Comments

  • Great job you guys!

    Sorry to bring this old post up again

    Please share the specs on this, batteries and stuff. Thanks

  • Hi Joseph, when the time will come to share ?

  • what are the equipments i would need to be able to fly long range using the sky walker?

  • hi guys  i also need some help ;

    i am giong to designe quadcopter with fpv camera which could be controlled from 5km range a collected all the data but i have still stuck with antenna.

    kindly guide me about long range antenna that could controll quad copter from 5km range

     

  • dear joseph if you can explain the details of antenna they use

     

  • 100KM

    Nice job guys.  The 33.5 kph seems like it might be getting close to stall speed for a heavy SW - though my experience is with the 1680 winged version.  At 2.6kg, it would start to wobble the wings at speeds below 10m/s.  Did you guys try to find the stall speed?  Is this the min power airspeed?

  • Moderator

    Yes I'd be up for that as well

  • 3DR first to market pre soldered Panasonic NCR18650PF packs customer selectable size/capacity configurations to suit their mission profile, lets go guys.. chop chop. 

  • Amazing work guys.   Incredible to see how fast things are advancing now.  Seems like almost every day there's a significant new accomplishment.

  • Joseph Aletky
    It's not like I haven't been doing that for like half a year since the sensor was announced...

    Some info about the plane, pictures... anything :P

    otherwise it's just bragging :P

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