Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With… Beach Balls?

July 26, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 45 Comments

While visiting the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, USA over the weekend, I came across a hack.

In addition to the excellent displays on site and an area where one can watch a video on repeat, the museum offers guided tours for a very reasonable price. And it was during this tour that my life as an aviation geek changed forever. Why? I got to visit the flight deck of the H4 and even sit in the pilots seat where Howard Hughes sat when he flew the plane almost 75 years ago.

It was later in the tour, after I’d had a moment to take in the enormity of sitting in the seat, that I found a wonderful hack to share with you all: and it’s all about beach balls. Continue reading “Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With… Beach Balls?” →

One Really Big Quadcopter That Is Following In The Steps Of The Spruce Goose

July 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

Behold the Land-Bear-Shark, a quadcopter on a rather grand scale. At a full eight kilograms it’s an easy target to compare the [Howard Hughes] behemoth, but in addition to the weight, this still has yet to make its first flight.

To give you some scale to the image above, the board at the center is an Arduino. It controls the beast, along with the help of a SparkFun IMU board which rides atop. Really, if any quadcopter of this size has a chance of working, this should be the one. The construction is beautiful, making use of carbon fiber rod along with 3D-printed connectors to assemble the frame. A lot of thought has gone into small things like conserving weight used on the landing gear, which are incorporated into the bottom corner brackets. The batteries are connected in a manner that makes them easy to adjust, acting as ballast for balancing the craft.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed that this will be more than the tongue-in-cheek title of the post which calls it a Quadrotor-shaped sculpture.

[via Adafruit]