Another Pilotless Flight

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pelmet
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Another Pilotless Flight

Post by pelmet »

Post deleted as it was placed in the appropriate thread.
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Last edited by pelmet on Sat May 14, 2022 5:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
Meatservo
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Re: Another Pilotless Flight

Post by Meatservo »

Back when I was a young adult, radio control gear was expensive, and most of us built free-flight models out of balsa wood frames with tissue paper skin shrunk on with nitrocellulose lacquer. They could be powered by a twisted rubber band, or for the bigger ones, a little one-cylinder engine running on nitromethane and methanol. The routine was to adjust the control surfaces (or on smaller ones, little bendy trim-tabs) to trim the model so that it would glide nice and flat without stalling, in a shallow right-hand turn. If you got the weight and balance and trim right, the torque of the motor would make the plane climb in a left turn, until the gas ran out or the rubber band untwisted all the way, at which point the model would begin to glide back down in a right turn as it was trimmed to do. It took a lot of skill and practice to get a plane to do this reliably, but I got to the point where I could get a model on skis to take off by itself, climb for a minute or two in a shallow left-hand turn, and then return more or less by itself to the same spot it took off from. With skis made from aluminium drink-can metal and wood, it would do a perfect landing too.

This reminds me of that. It must have been really annoying, but on some level kind of cool too.Maybe not for the owner. But for other people.
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