Model Airplanes

A ‘RECKLESS’ flying fanatic has been fined £2,000 for flying a model aircraft near Heathrow Airport days after more than 1,000 flights were grounded by drone sightings at Gatwick.

George Rusu, 38, flew the 1m-long Tundre aircraft on a field near a runway at Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, on Christmas Eve.

Just days earlier Gatwick Airport endured three days of chaos affecting more than 140,000 passengers after a series of drone sightings forced runways to close a number of times.

Rusu, from Hillingdon, pleaded guilty to flying a small unmanned aircraft without permission of air traffic control at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court.

Court documents state Rusu lives just a few hundred yards from Heathrow.

Deputy District Judge Robert Roscoe said his actions were “stupid to say the least” and blasted him for failing to “engage his brain”.

He said: “I have some difficult understanding your mental process; in the few days before you committed this offence and your offence in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport, at the neighbouring Gatwick Airport, tens of thousands of people, their friends and their family, airlines, support staff at the airlines and very many people had their holidays ruined by something not connected with you, by a drone somebody else flew.

“There was a huge cost both emotionally and financially to all those people at Gatwick and you knew by having the news bulletins, and you watch the news and read newspapers as I do, that police and security

Article source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8254694/drone-fanatic-fined-heathrow-christmas-eve-gatwick-flights-grounded/

Now in its 34th day, the partial U.S. government shutdown is the longest shutdown in history. Roger Crandall, CEO of MassMutual and board member of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., said that the shutdown is starting to cost the museum millions of dollars.

“Quarterly the economic impact of the shutdown is beginning to be real,” Crandall told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. “We’re losing a million a day in revenue, and more importantly, people can’t see our amazing museums. It is one of the coolest things in the world that all of those museums are free for anybody … So let’s get the museums open.”

Because many of the attractions in America’s capital city are free to the public, many wouldn’t assume that museums like the Smithsonian would be taking such a hit.

However, according to Crandall, “People come in, and they shop in the stores. They buy model airplanes at the Air Space Museum, and again you don’t think about it but that’s all part of how we fund the Smithsonian. We’re not [getting] any revenue from charging people for coming in, and those revenues from our other activities are part of it.”

Crandall is hopeful that the shutdown will end soon. “There’s a Smithsonian board meeting coming up next week, and we won’t

Article source: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/smithsonian-board-member-the-shutdown-is-spoiling-one-of-the-coolest-things-in-the-world-211324520.html

What inspired you to take an interest in robots?

Lentink as a high-schooler, winding the rubber band of his model airplane with another flying in the background, circa 1994. (Image credit: Courtesy David Lentink)

I designed and built model airplanes at high school and set flight duration records in competition. The rubber-powered airplanes I designed then were passively stable – they had to fly on their own without any computer onboard – so the design had to be just right. They could fly up to 18 minutes on a single rubber band. (I did not compete in world championships, but plan to pick it up again when I am 70 years old, because that is the ideal age to become world champion in it!)

I also started building flapping model airplanes powered by rubber bands. From this hobby, I learned robots could do so much more if you build in the dynamics that they need to perform well passively. Then you can focus the limited onboard control on what matters most to complete a mission.

This lesson has proven a real advantage because I don’t get bogged down by dogmas requiring impossible computational power. It has also helped me question the conventional wisdom that unstable aerial robots that are constantly controlled by an autopilot are most maneuverable. More important, the instability of robots may be a key factor that is limiting them from flying well in turbulence, such as gusts of wind in urban environments.

What was your first robotics project?

My first project was

Article source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/01/16/stanfords-robot-makers-david-lentink/

LEESBURG – A local pilot is working with Rolls-Royce on its quest to break a world record.

British engineers and pilots with Rolls-Royce and Electroflight, an aviation startup, are in town this week to study Bob Frazer’s Nemesis NXT, a kit airplane that can reach speeds of up to 420 mph. They’re using Frazer’s as a model to build the fastest all-electric plane in history.

“It’s really neat,” said Bob Frazer, founder of the World Racer Program and a Leesburg resident. “I’m just a guy. I’m just a private pilot, a general aviation pilot. All of the sudden, I get these guys calling me up and saying, ‘Hey, we’d love to fly your airplane.’”

Rolls-Royce last year launched the initiative, ACCEL, short for Accelerating the Electrification of Flight, to not only break a world record, but also to pioneer more sustainable power in aerospace technology. They carefully searched the world for the base design of the “Spirit of Innovation,” looking for a plane that was fast, light and spacious enough for batteries.

They settled on the NXT, but faced a hurdle. There are only about eight completed in the world. The record-breaking prototype racing plane retired last year and is now on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

“We were sitting there watching the flying NXTs, watching one going to the Smithsonian,” said Matheu Parr, ACCEL program director. “Another gentleman who’s got one is re-engining his. We thought, ‘They’re all disappearing.’”

Only one was actually flying – Frazer’s.

So members of

Article source: https://www.dailycommercial.com/news/20190124/local-pilot-helping-rolls-royce-quest-to-break-world-record