Hi Folks – As the status message on the right indicates, we’ve had a good “return to flight” weekend, with the successful demonstration of a helicopter-borne vertical raceway. This should not have been so difficult to begin with, but sometimes execution of a plan takes an unexpected detour, as was the case here.
In the next several posts I will cover what we did over the weekend, why we did it the way we did, and how it all turned out.
Special thanks to Greg Schoenbachler of Silver Stream Organics and Cattle Company for the generous permission to use their land, and to Doug Uttecht and John Peden from Northwest Helicopters for pulling extra hard on that helicopter.
In preparing the follow-up report for the test, I also found this gem in my archives – a helicopter flight video from youTube, demonstrating the basic ability of a helicopter controlling its position while maintaining a constant pulling force on a long line – this is what convinced us (almost a year ago) that in principle this operation is feasible with a helicopter using standard practices. However, as the saying goes, the devil’s in the details, and the past year was spent mostly on ironing these out.
Stay Tuned for more information, coming your way soon.
Ben






For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...