ALTURA DRONE - STORM FLIGHT - 5.12.2013 from Aerialtronics on Vimeo.
Pretty impressive flight by Aerialtronics Altura multirotor in some heavy winds. Intuitively, the design does not look optimised for flying in heavy wind, as its frontal area looks rather large.
Comments
I give up on the metric thing, nothing personal, it's really just cultural. One last thing I'll say though is that when someone comes along and succeeds in sweeping away seemingly illogical or obscure elements of a culture or society in the name of simplification and practicality (from their viewpoint) there is always something significant lost. This happened in music when pitches and scales were standardized, it's happened in various languages, it's happened in all sorts of arts and crafts and industries. Ease of use for some becomes bland, dull and awkward regimentation for others. Dogma replaced by dogma. And to be clear, I'm certainly not opposed to the use of the metric system and its units in the thousands of applications where it is clearly superior.
As for the wind speed issue, excuse me, again, but scroll up and you will see your own statement which I already quoted once: "I would love to see the video of a 450 Trex flying in 40mph winds in manual" . I showed you that and you then said and I quote "20-25mph is a far cry from 56", and then you ignore the strong visual evidence of the dust cloud ripping along and complain about the trees in the background. This is a curving river canyon right at its opening to the Pacific, and it gets jets of intense wind like that, gusts, sometimes just over the flats, sometimes over the water, and so on. If I had the time I'd go back and measure out a hundred feet (that would be about 30 meters) and then calculate the speed of that dust cloud. But just looking at it I'd bet a bundle that it's moving at well over 50 ft/sec, so about 40 mph. Maybe I and the pilot were way off, you can hear us calling it 50 (mph) on the video, I decided that was probably a bit high. Well, at least I'm not claiming any world records. And by the way, I have 55 years of riding motorcycles under my belt, maybe 100 miles of it with a windshield, so I know exactly what a 40 mph wind feels like.
I find the cultural ossification on display here kind of interesting albeit sad, and now I'm agreeing with you when you state that this discussion is "silly" and "barely worth responding to," but not because of its content. So I'm through with it. Too bad, I thought we had some things to talk about.
do you know the term measurement?
you mentioned a wind speed starting at 60 km/h in your blog post.
to be fair the windspeed in your blog post would be in the middle of 60 and 90 km/h.
lots of digits and no evidence.
here +47° 7' 58.33", +7° 3' 27.18" the measured top windspeed was 150 km/h.
What is this comment directed at exactly? Lots of windspeed talk here.
robert, did you measure the windspeed?
the gusts where at 140 km/h - not just what you described starting at 60 km/h.
interesting is to see the speed plot :)
I'm not changing the game, I'm suggesting that does not look like 40 mph winds. The trees are not even moving. You're the one changing the game, presenting a flight of a helicopter in 20-40(maybe) mph winds as evidence that flying a multirotor in 56 mph winds is easy.
The metric stuff is barely worth responding to. I've never been in a situation where cutting a sheet of paper in half to the nearest 0.1 mm using a ruler was even vaguely important. Your whole idea here is flawed because you assume that an American sheet of paper is EXACTLY 8 1/2 by 11, so could easily be cut in half, precisely with a standard ruler. I just pulled a sheet out of my printer, and it is in fact 10 63/64ths, so cannot be cut precisely in half at 5 1/2" anyway. The narrow way is actually 8 15/16ths, so it's even worse. In any case, this could be done more accurately in metric anyway, as a standard office ruler has 1mm gradations, and only 1/16th" which are larger.
What a silly argument this is.
You're right that the metric system was invented a little while ago, and isn't perfect. So let's stick to a system whereby everything is based on the length of the thumb of some king who died long ago, cause that makes much more sense.
Robert, how about not changing the game in mid stream? You wrote, "I would love to see the video of a 450 Trex flying in 40mph winds in manual, that should be readily available?" Not 56 but 40. Which is what I gave you in the video I spent a bunch of time finding and posting. As stated, 20-25 with gusts to 40+. So how about "That's cool" instead of "Far Cry" ?
Also, congratulations on discovering how to divide 10 by 3. Could you share that with us? And meanwhile, can I have the leftover penny every time someone in Canada tries that with a dollar, or $10, or $100? LOL
The yard and the foot are each perfectly divisible by two and by three, using the inch.
Then there's paper (to name one of many, many things). Letter paper. 8 1/2 X 11 inches here, as is well known by everyone. Easy to cut in half either way with a ruler having nice wide 1/4 inch graduations. Let's try that with metric letter writing paper. What, you don't know how big it is because everyone calls it A4? Why is that? Oh, because it's 297mm X 210mm and those are awkward big numbers to use as a name? OK, well let's cut one in half. Yikes, we need a ruler having .5 mm graduations. Well, I'll use one with 1mm graduations and guess at the half mm. Still hard to see, and easy to make a mistake.
The metric units were established at a time when science was in its infancy and we were barely out of the dark ages. There were lifelong attempts by people who were still fiddling around with alchemy to impose universal this and universal that (including language) on everyone. The results worked better in some venues than others. All had, and have, good points and bad points.
PS: Yes, hamburgers ... a quarter-pounder, not a 133-grammer, thanks.
20-25mph is a far cry from 56. The trees aren't even moving. But I'm still impressed anyway. 450 's are fidgety little things at the best of times.
I'm in the unusual position of being heavily exposed to both systems, since I live in Canada where we still have one foot in the imperial system. My bathroom scale measures in pounds, I still buy hamburger by the pound. And car manufacturers still report mileage in MPG. Only they use imperial gallons, not American gallons, so this is extra stupid because nobody knows what an imperial gallon is anymore. We buy gas by the litre, and the odometers run in km. So nobody knows how to fact-check the OEM claims. I'm sure this fact is part of the reason why OEM's continue to use it.
So I do use both. The fact that metric is far superior is very clear.
What's 10cm divided by 3? 3.33cm. What is 1" divided by 3? 1/3rd inch, or 21.3/64ths. Try finding that on a ruler. So I really fail to see your point there.
@ Robert
Here's a clip of the 450 in high wind: I have better somewhere but it took me nearly an hour to find this.
http://youtu.be/kB7M_lGV1zI
As for the rest, I don't have time to debate it except to mention that it has been a popular pastime for decades to smugly ridicule and mock the Anglo/American measurement systems in contrast to the metric system. I used to do it myself, until my late father, a successful architect and civil engineer and a professor of both at Notre Dame, pointed out to me the fundamental issue of scale and the subsequent awkwardness of using either system exclusively. The usefulness of a ten-base system is great until you want to divide things into thirds, and the size of many of the units was arbitrary and unfortunate. People who have never known anything but one or the other are missing some very useful tools, either way.
Also: English is forced onto the global aviation community? Exactly what else would work, Esperanto? You certainly can't mean that there should be a mix of a couple of hundred languages in the air. My first choice would probably be German but that would go over like a fart in church, so English it is.
Cheers,
Oliver
Oliver, I will anxiously await your video of your hex flying in 56 mph winds. As I said, it's pretty dang hard. And I would love to see the video of a 450 Trex flying in 40mph winds in manual, that should be readily available?
As far as units are concerned...The only reason that the rest of the world flies in knots and feet, is because the US aviation industry forced it on everybody else. It's the same reason why English is the default language for airline travel.
However, you shouldn't confuse this domination of aviation industry nomenclature, with that of aviation engineering. You should note that engineering is done in metric. Even the car makers have changed over. The reason being, despite the fact the imperial system may seem kind of touchy-feely, it's completely illogical and difficult to use.
Just this morning, my son asked me "how many feet are there in a mile?" I had to think about that... well, I know that 1/4 miles is 1320, just because people always talk about "running the 1320", something I wouldn't have known had I not been a car guy in the US. So then, 1320*4 is 5280. So 5280 feet in a mile. What? How difficult was that?
How many meters are in a kilometer? 1000. How many millimeters are in a kilometers? 1,000,000. How big is one litre? Well, it's 0.1m cubed, or, 1 decimetre cubed. That's easy. How much does 1 litre of water weigh? 1 kg. Very easy stuff.
The idea that the metric system is hard to use because the sizes aren't right... that's silly.
There's 1.6 km in a mile. What's so special about a mile that a unit 40% smaller is a problem? 1 metre is very close to a yard. A common smallest unit of measure is 1/32nd inch. That's actually very close to 1mm. But there's 1,000,000 mm in km, so that's easy. How many 1/32nd are there in a mile? 2,027,520
Yeah, that just makes SO much sense.
BTW, if your scale reads 160lbs when you stand on it, what is your mass?
@leonardthall
I have no idea what you mean by my "world record high horse", unless in your aggressive and rude stance you failed to interpret my "world records" as the satirical reference it is (they are for transport of aspirin by microcopter, first microquad/skateboard hybrid, and first microquad on floats).As for more humor, that one having gone over your head, if you look at my past posts you'll find a number of major satirical pieces in the forums and blogs which a lot of people thought very funny. And I find it interesting how quickly someone claiming to be all funny themselves turns personally vicious the minute their misconceptions and misinformations are gently pointed out and explained. So, to quote you, "Just to be clear," you know what you can do with your asinine personal attack.
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