Ready
to fly away from your cubicle yet? Ron Darner, a longtime CR4er who serves as
the newsletter editor for Chapter 320 (Watertown,
Wisconsin) of the Experimental
Aircraft Organization (EAA), has offered to take us on another virtual
aerospace tour. So fasten your seatbelts, folks. This time, we're traveling through time and space.
Advances in Ice Sensing
New Avionics Corporation has
a new ice sensing system that the company claims is far smaller, lighter, less
power-hungry, and more sensitive than anything previously available. The probe
is 1.1 inches long and 0.26 inches in diameter, and weighs less than 10 grams. The
interface circuit board weighs about 1 ounce. Based on this description, the
gauge that goes in the panel is probably the heaviest component, and wiring will
be second in a typical installation.
The Propeller is a Wing
According
to Paul Lipps of the EAA Experimenter, "all books on wing theory state that the
most efficient wing makes use of an elliptical planform/elliptical lift
distribution. Since a propeller is basically a wing in rotary motion, creating
its lift and thrust from the combination of rotary and forward motion, I
reasoned that an elliptical lift would be my "E" ticket choice. In newsletter
item entitled The ELIPPSE
Propeller, Lipps describes an unusual new propeller design that's built for
efficiency. And if you haven't subscribed to The Experimenter yet – it's time!
The Battle of Britain
Wikpedia
offers a short short biography of a British WWII pilot, Sir
Douglas Robert Steuart Bader, CBE,
who had some incredible achievements – a
quite interesting fellow! He'd lost his
legs in a crash years earlier, but was drafted into the Royal Air Force (RAF), and became a
combat ace, winning many flying awards, and becoming a Group Commander. As the
Wikipedia entry explains, "It was thought that Bader's success as a fighter
pilot was partly due to having no legs; pilots pulling high 'G' in combat turns
often 'blacked out' as the flow of blood from the brain drained to other parts
of the body - usually the legs."
Wilbur Wright
Made a Movie
Wilbur Wright took a movie
camera along for a ride in 1909, when flying in France! Click
here to watch the resulting film.
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