airplane

64 Articles

Miss Beatrice Shilling Saves The Spitfire

January 16, 2018 by 53 Comments

On a bright spring morning in 1940, the Royal Air Force pilot was in the fight of his life. Strapped into his brand new Supermarine Spitfire, he was locked in mortal combat with a Luftwaffe pilot over the English Channel in the opening days of the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire was behind the Messerschmitt and almost within range to unleash a deadly barrage of rounds from the four eight Browning machine guns in the leading edges of the elliptical wings. With the German plane just below the centerline of the gunsight’s crosshairs, the British pilot pushed the Spit’s lollipop stick forward to dive slightly and rake his rounds across the Bf-109. He felt the tug of the harness on his shoulders keeping him in his seat as the nimble fighter pulled a negative-g dive, and he lined up the fatal shot.

But the powerful V-12 Merlin engine sputtered, black smoke trailing along the fuselage as the engine cut out. Without power, the young pilot watched in horror as the three-bladed propeller wound to a stop. With the cold Channel waters looming in his windscreen, there was no time to restart the engine. The pilot bailed out in the nick of time, watching his beautiful plane cartwheel into the water as he floated down to join it, wondering what had just happened.

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3D Printed Airplane Engine Runs On Air

December 27, 2017 by 13 Comments

One of the most important considerations when flying remote-controlled airplanes is weight. Especially if the airplane has a motor, this has a huge potential impact on weight. For this reason, [gzumwalt] embarked on his own self-imposed challenge to build an engine with the smallest weight and the lowest parts count possible, and came away with a 25-gram, 8-part engine.

The engine is based around a single piston and runs on compressed air. The reduced parts count is a result of using the propeller axle as a key component in the engine itself. There are flat surfaces on the engine end of the axle which allow it to act as a valve and control its own timing. [gzumwalt] notes that this particular engine was more of a thought experiment and might not actually produce enough thrust to run an airplane, but that it certainly will spark up some conversations among RC enthusiasts.

The build is also one of the first designs in what [gzumwalt] hopes will be a series of ever-improving engine designs. Perhaps he should join forces with this other air-powered design that we’ve just recently featured. Who else is working on air-powered planes? Who knew that this was a thing?

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How To Build An Airplane In A Month And A Half

November 1, 2017 by 49 Comments

For the last few weeks, RC pilot extraordinaire [Peter Sripol] has been working on his biggest project to date. It’s effectively a manned RC plane, now legally a Part 103 ultralight. Now all that work is finally bearing fruit. [Peter] is flying this plane on some short hops down a grass runway. He’s flying it, and proving that you can build a plane in a basement, in under two months, constructed almost entirely out of insulation foam.

[Peter] has been documenting this build on his YouTube channel, and although the materials for this plane are mostly sourced from either Home Depot or Lowes, the construction is remarkably similar to what you would expect to find in other homebuilt aircraft. This thing has plywood gussets, the foam is wearing a thin layer of fiberglass, and the fasteners are from Aircraft Spruce.

The power system is another matter entirely. The engines (all two of them!) are electric and are designed for very large RC aircraft. These engines suck down power from a massive battery pack in the nose, and the twin throttles are really just linear potentiometers hacked onto servo testers. There’s a surprising amount of very important equipment on this plane that is just what [Peter] had sitting around the workshop.

As far as the legality of this ultralight experiment is concerned, [Peter] is pretty much above-board. This is a Part 103 ultralight, and legally any moron can jump in an ultralight and fly. There are some highly entertaining YouTube videos attesting this fact. However, in one of [Peter]’s livestreams, he flew well after sunset without any strobes on the plane. We’re going to call this a variant of go-fever, technically illegal, and something that could merit a call from the FAA. We’re going to give him a pass on this, though.

This build still isn’t done, though. The pitot tube is held onto the windshield with duct tape. The plane was slightly nose heavy, but shifting the batteries around helped with that. [Peter] is running the motors on 12S batteries, and the prop/motor combo should be run on 14S batteries — $1200 of batteries are on order. The entire plane needs a paint job, but there’s no indication that will ever be done. With all that said, this is a functional manned aircraft built in a basement in less than two months.

With the plane complete and ground tests quickly moving on to flight tests, it’s only fitting to mention [Peter]’s GoFundMe page for a parachute. [Peter] is going to fly this thing anyway, and this is a great way to deflect Internet concern trolls. [Peter]’s just short of the $2600 needed for a parachute, but if the funds received go over that amount by a few hundred, a ballistic parachute will save [Peter] and the plane.

Building An Ultralight Out Of Foam In A Basement

August 14, 2017 by 50 Comments

[Peter Sripol] is something of a legend in the DIY RC aircraft crowd. He’s friends with Flite Test, and there he built an enormous RC cargo plane that could easily carry a small child aloft. Now, [Peter] is aiming a bit higher. He’s building an ultralight — a manned ultralight — in his basement. It’s made out of insulation foam.

Yes, this ultralight is constructed out of insulation foam, but you can think of that as just a skin. The real structure here comes from a wooden frame that will be fiberglassed. The design of this aircraft is an electric, twin-engine biplane. The relevant calculations have already been done, and [Peter] is already flying an RC scale model of this craft. So far, everything is not as sketchy as it could be.

As with any, ‘guy builds an airplane in his basement’ story, there must be a significant amount of time dedicated to the legality, practicality, and engineering of said plane. First off, the legality. [Peter] is actually building an ultralight under Part 103. The certifications for a Part 103 ultralight are much more lenient than the next step up in FAA-certified aircraft, a light sport or experimental aircraft. An ultralight is not required to have an airworthiness certification, and pilots of ultralights are not required to pass any tests of aeronautical knowledge or hold a medical certificate. Yes, legally, any moron can jump in an ultralight and fly. Think about that the next time someone brings up the Part 107 ‘drone’ certification.

Next, the practicality and engineering. [Peter]’s plane can weigh a maximum of 254 pounds, and should not be capable of more than 55 knots in full power level flight, while having a stall speed that does not exceed 24 knots. This is slow for a Cessna, but just about right for the gigantic remote-controlled planes [Peter] has already built.  A few years ago, [Peter] built a gigantic remote-controlled cargo plane out of what is basically foam board and a few aluminum tubes. The construction of [Peter]’s ultralight will be a highly refined version of this. He’s using foam insulation sheets for the body of the fuselage, reinforced with plywood and poplar struts. This foam and wood build will be wrapped with carbon fiber and fiberglass sheet, epoxied, and hopefully painted with flames on the side.

The use of poplar is a bit curious for an ultralight aircraft. For the last hundred years, the default wood for aircraft has been either spruce or douglas fir. The reason for this choice is the strength to weight ratio; spruce and douglas fir have the highest strength to weight ratio of any other wood. Poplar, however, is ultimately stronger and available at his local home improvement store, even though it does weigh a bit more. If [Peter] can keep the weight down in other areas, poplar is an excellent choice due to cost and availability. The video (below) is unclear, but we can only hope [Peter] has read up on the strength of aircraft frames and the orientation of the grain of each structural member.

This is the first video in what will be an amazing build series, and [Peter] hopes to get this thing up in the air by September. If you’re concerned about [Peter]’s safety, he’s also put up a GoFundMe page for a parachute. [Peter]’s going to fly this thing if you complain or concern troll or not, so donate a dollar for the parachute if you’re that concerned.

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Heads-Up Display Turns Car Into Fighter Jet

July 20, 2017 by 31 Comments

While most of us will never set foot in a fighter jet, some of us can still try to get as close as possible. One of the most eye-catching features of a fighter jet (at least from the pilot’s point-of-view) is the heads-up display, so that’s exactly what [Frank] decided to build into his car to give it that touch of fighter jet style.

Heads-up displays use the small reflectivity of a transparent surface to work. In this case, [Frank] uses an LED strip placed on the dashboard to shine up into the windshield. A small amount of light is reflected back to the driver which is able to communicate vehicle statues without obscuring view of the road. [Frank]’s system is able to display information reported over the CAN bus, including voltage, engine RPM, and speed.

This display seems to account for all the issues we could think up. It automatically cycles through modes depending on driving style (revving the engine at a stoplight switches it to engine RPM mode, for example), the LEDs automatically dim at night to avoid blinding the driver, and it interfaces with the CAN bus which means the ability to display any other information in the future should be relatively straightforward. [Frank] does note some rough edges, though, namely with the power supply and the fact that there’s a large amount of data on the CAN bus that the Teensy microcontroller has a hard time sorting out.

That being said, the build is well polished and definitely adds a fighter jet quality to the car. And if [Frank] ever wants even more aviation cred for his ground transportation, he should be able to make use of a 747 controller for something on the dashboard, too.

Santos Dumont And The Origins Of Aviation

February 8, 2017 by 58 Comments

The history of aviation is a fascinating one, spanning more than two thousand years starting from kites and tower jumping. Many hackers are also aviation fans, and the name of Alberto Santos Dumont may be familiar, but if not, here we talk about his role and accomplishments in the field. Santos Dumont is one of the few aviation pioneers that made contributions in both balloons, airships and heavier-than-air aircraft.

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We Recommend That You Enter A Cyclocopter From The Front

November 24, 2016 by 16 Comments

It’s crazy to think that we’ve optimized the heck out of some types of powered flight when there are entire theories and methods that haven’t even seen many government research dollars, let alone the light of day. The cyclocopter is apparently one of those. It was dreamt up around the same time as a helicopter, but was too audacious for the material science of the time. We have helicopters, but [Professor Moble Benedict] and his graduate students, [Carl Runco] and [David Coleman], hope to bring cyclocopters to reality soon.

For obvious reasons they remind us of cyclocranes, as the wings rotate around their global axis, they also rotate back and forth in a cycloidal pattern around their local axis. By changing this pattern a little bit, the cyclocopter can generate a wide variety of thrust vectors, and, hopefully, zip around all over the place. Of course, just as a helicopter needs a prop perpendicular to its main rotor on its tail to keep if from spinning around its axis, the cyclocopter needs a prop facing upwards on its tail.

It does have a small problem though. The bending force on its wings are so strong that they tend to want to snap and fly off in all different directions. Fortunately in the past hundred years we’ve gotten ridiculously good at certain kinds of material science. Especially when it comes to composites we might actually be able to build blades for these things. If we can do that, then the sky’s the limit.

[Professor Benedict] and his team are starting small. Very small. Their first copter weighs in under 30 grams. It took them two years of research to build. It will hopefully lead to bigger and bigger cyclocopters until, perhaps, we can even build one a person can get into, and get out of again.