Collaborate Disseminate
It’s a situation that plays out every day, all over the world – you walk into work, and there’s a full-scale foam toilet sitting on the bench, demanding to be used in a crackpot project. This time, it happened to be at the [FliteTest] workshop, and naturally, they set about …read more
In the days during and immediately after World War II, aerospace research was a forefront consideration for national security. All manner of wild designs were explored as nation states attempted to gain the upper hand in the struggle for survival. The Hiller Hornet was one such craft built during this time – a helicopter which drove the rotor through tip-mounted ramjets. Unsurprisingly, this configuration had plenty of drawbacks which prevented it from ever reaching full production. The team at [FliteTest] had a soft spot for the craft, however, and used it to inspire their latest radio controlled experiment.
Initial experiments …read more
We’ve always had a fascination with things that fly. Sure, drones are the latest incarnation of that, but there have been RC planes, kites, and all sorts of flying toys and gizmos even before manned flight was possible. Maybe the first model flying machine you had was a paper airplane. There’s some debate, but it appears the Chinese and Japanese made paper airplanes 2,000 years ago. Now there’s a database of paper airplane designs, some familiar and some very cool-looking ones we just might have to try.
If you folded the usual planes in school, you’ll find those here. But …read more
Continue reading Paper Airplane Database has the Wright Stuff
The snake stowaway has been confiscated by the US Fish and Wildlife Services. Continue reading A Man Tried to Smuggle a Python Onto a Plane Inside a Hard Drive
For the first time, scientists have empirically verified electricity’s role in the ballooning abilities of spiders. Continue reading Spiders Can Fly Thousands of Miles With Electric Power
Iran’s military unveiled a new version of its homebuilt Qaher F313 fighter jet last weekend, but a drive down the runway revealed it’s far from ready for flight. Continue reading Iran’s Stealth Fighter Is Still Fake and Not Convincing Anyone
[Richard Browning] wants to fly like Daedalus. To us, it looks a bit more like Iron Man. [Browning] is working on project Daedalus, a flight suit powered by six jet engines. These turbines are exactly the type one would find on large, fast, and expensive R/C planes. Some of this is documented on his YouTube channel, Gravity Industries, though RedBull has also gotten involved and have a video of their own that you can check out after the break.
The project started last year in [Browning’s] garage. He strapped a jet to an old washing machine to test its thrust. …read more
The history of aviation is a fascinating one, spanning more than two thousand years starting from kites and tower jumping. Many hackers are also aviation fans, and the name of Alberto Santos Dumont may be familiar, but if not, here we talk about his role and accomplishments in the field. Santos Dumont is one of the few aviation pioneers that made contributions in both balloons, airships and heavier-than-air aircraft.
Santos Dumont was the youngest son of a wealthy coffee producer in Brazil. From his earliest years he was fascinated by the machinery of …read more
When [Zeke Gabrielse] needed to book a flight, the Internet hive-mind recommended that he look into traveling with Southwest airlines due to a drop in fares late Thursday nights. Not one to stay up all night refreshing the web page indefinitely, he opted to write a script to take care of the tedium for him.
Settling on Node.js as his web scraper of choice, numerous avenues of getting the flight pricing failed before he finally had to cobble together a script that would fill out and submit the search form for him. With the numbers coming in, [Grabrielse] set up …read more
Continue reading Sticking With The Script For Cheap Plane Tickets
The types of steps and missteps the Wright brothers took in developing the first practical airplane should be familiar to hackers. They started with a simple kite design and painstakingly added only a few features at a time, testing each, and discarding some. The airfoil data they had was wrong and they had to make their own wind tunnel to produce their own data. Unable to find motor manufacturers willing to do a one-off to their specifications, they had to make their own.
Sound familiar? Here’s a trip through the Wright brothers development of the first practical airplane.
Continue reading The Wright Flyer: Engineering And Iterating
