These scientists describe their UAV project at the South Pole. Sound familiar?
"Flying a mission is always a little scary. Tom, the project engineer and pilot, stands by with his remote control and flies it a little until a stable flight is acheived, then we engage the autopilot. The plane then turns and heads off into the distance, disappearing from view after about half a mile, and dropping out of radio contact with its computer base station after four miles or so. That part of the mission is the most scary, as we've nothing to do but wait for fifteen minutes biting our nails as the plane follows its plan.
We breath a sigh of relief when we regain the signal and see some coordinates on the screen, but only declare success once we've seen the machine, taken it smoothly back down to the snow, and downloaded the data its recorded."
Comments
I flew a balloon up to 30k once and we had thought about keeping batteries warm so we put some of them in a foam beer cooler and broke a heat stick inside, that worked!!
I thought leaving the laptop in a case with the fan pumping its own heated air back from the cooling fan would be enough but the laptop stopped working just past 20k, working perfectly once it had heated up again.
It was about -42C when we topped out, but no wind chill. ;-)
Hats off (perhaps not) to those chaps working in that cold.
If they are getting useful data off such a small airframe then even better.
A beer in my local for the first person to identify the airframe.
G
We get -40 here a couple weeks every year, but I sure don't venture out with my R/C stuff in that.
The comment about the batteries is a very good question.
The few times I have flown in the snow, the R/X batteries couldn't be trusted for more than a few minutes. We had to warm a second 1200mah pack inside our jackets to revive them.
(completely diff problem than your previous article about the Predators in Iraq overheating!)
Actually, now that I look at the silver decal above the nose, I realize it is not a visibility stripe, but a windscreen decal, so you may be right that it is a scale model of the de Havilland after all.
Paul
Looks very like a Dash8 an excellent aircraft in real life.
Also wonder how they keep the batteries warm.
Exciting times