Model Airplanes

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Peggy Kite is the last member of her generation from the family that built the Baldwin Piano Co.
The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar

Strains of Beethoven and Schumann lulled Peggy Wulsin Kite to sleep when she was a child. The music was being played downstairs by famous artists who were guests in the family’s 30-room Hyde Park mansion. They liked to practice all night.

“How do I put this?” asked the 89-year-old Kite. “They just arrived.”

Speaking in her Montgomery home, where she has two Baldwin baby grands in her living room, Kite continued: “I’d come home from school and I wouldn’t know who would be at the dinner table that night.”

The next day, Kite’s father, Lucien Wulsin II, the president of the Baldwin Piano Company, would take the pianists to the factory to pick out a grand piano for their concert with the symphony later that week.

When whiteflies take off, they don’t just spread their wings and fly. Just .03 of an inch long, these tiny insects possess a variety of sophisticated techniques to achieve exceptional stability in the air.

Tel Aviv University researchers believe that makers of small robotic manmade flyers, such as miniaturized drones, can learn a lot about a stable takeoff from whiteflies.

Their research, presented at a recent Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities conference, explored how whiteflies take off without flapping their long folded wings. They raise only their wingtips to provide air resistance and stability.

“Whiteflies take a powerful ‘jump’ before they start using their wings in flight,” said lead researcher Gal Ribak, head of TAU’s Biomechanics of Animal Locomotion Laboratory.

 “Then, when the insects are moving through the air, they have to stop the rotation of their bodies to reorient themselves for flapping flight. They are able to do that by extending the tips of their folded wings, causing high air resistance behind the body. This aerodynamic force stabilizes the take-off and only then do the insects spread their wings and start flying.”

This entire process takes less than 12 milliseconds and doesn’t require feedback from the nervous system.

“Nature is providing us with guidance on how to stabilize the take-off of small robotic manmade flyers,” Ribak said.

According to the study, conducted with TAU undergraduate student Eyal Dafni and in collaboration with the late TAU emeritus professor of entomology Dan Gerling, air resistance of body parts is the key.

“The whiteflies leave

Article source: https://www.israel21c.org/tiny-whiteflies-provide-clue-for-stabilizing-drones/

By Judi Brinegar jbrinegar@courier-tribune.com Twitter: @JudiBrinegarCT

ASHEBORO — Many aviation and World War II history buffs know the story of Maj. George Preddy.

Preddy, who was from Greensboro, was one of the top flying aces during World War II. While leading the 328th Fighter Squadron of the 352nd Fighter Group, he was downed by friendly fire during the Battle of the Bulge on Christmas Day 1944.

On Saturday, the N.C. Aviation Museum Hall of Fame was the recipient of a 1/5 scale model of Preddy’s last plane, a P-51 Mustang with the moniker “Cripes A’Mighty 3rd.”

Placed in the shadow of the wing of a 1/3 scale model built by Chuck Cecil of Thomasville, the two planes pay tribute to a man who is ranked as the third highest scoring ace in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), the seventh highest scoring American ace and is the top P-51 Mustang ace, with his total air-to-air victories listed as 26.83. Preddy’s total score at the end of World War II was 32.5 enemy aircraft destroyed.

Keith Hodgin, a board member at the museum, said this has been in the works for six months or so.

“The Preddy Memorial Foundation had a model on loan here a while back and it was then sent to the Greensboro airport. A guy in Florida, Tom Smith, built this one (1/5 scale model). The foundation bought it. They asked if we wanted to take over (the transaction) and we said, ‘Of course, we do.’

Article source: http://www.courier-tribune.com/news/20170415/preddy-planes-on-display-at-air-museum

The longer the Fast Furious franchise has gone on, the more superhuman its characters have become. Early in the series, a car crash might actually kill a character. (The life and death stakes were in the ‘speed’ part of the equation.) Now, though, characters routinely walk away from much more serious accidents without a scratch. A small sampling: leaping off a 300-foot cliff, driving through the nose of a burning airplane in a car that’s on fire and then flips over about a dozen times, flying off a tank at about 60 mph and landing on a car.

Those characters weren’t pregnant. In Furious 7 Elena (Elsa Pataky) and Hobbes (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson) go flying out of an exploding building, courtesy of villain Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), and land on a car below. The heroes of the Fast universe routinely treat cars like trampolines. They break falls and cause minimal bodily harm. But even Hobbs, robust as he is, ended in the hospital after that fall. Elena, however, was fine.

Given the timeline established by Fate of the Furious, Elena must have

Article source: http://time.com/4725349/fast-furious-8-fate-plot-holes/

[PeterSripol] has made an RC model airplane but instead of using normal wings he decided to try getting it to fly  using some KFC chicken buckets instead. Two KFC buckets in the place of wings were attached to a motor which spins the buckets up to speed. With a little help from the Magnus effect this creates lift.

Many different configurations were tried to get this contraption off the ground. They eventually settled on a dual prop setup, each spinning counter to each other for forward momentum. This helped to negate the gyroscopic effect of the spinning buckets producing the lift. After many failed build-then-fly attempts they finally got it in the air. It works, albeit not to well, but it did fly and was controllable. Perhaps with a few more adjustments and a bit of trial and error someone could build a really unique RC plane using this concept.

Article source: http://hackaday.com/2017/04/14/kfc-winged-aircraft-actually-flys/