Cool Engineering

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

Flying not so high :(

After ironing out some of the kinks with the bearing PID - which is the bearing autopilot today we went off flying. Unfortunately by the time we had ourselves all setup there was a growing gusty wind. This flight was conducted on an oval in Bundoora which is linked to two other ovals. Our normal ground - the La Trobe sports grounds was in use by two different cricket groups - they had divided the oval up between themselves.

Unfortunately this flight was far from spectacular. After switching over to autopilot, the autopilot (admittedly underdamped) began tracking the specific bearings that were had chosen. After about 10 seconds major mechanical failure ensured when one of the wings snapped in half - plummeting our plane to the ground rather quickly. I guess the wind might have been a bit too much. It's really rather annoying as my last few landings have been quite splendid.
A red dot shows the takeoff point - a blue dot shows the landing point.

The flight log can be read here

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