FanFacts H
ello again! I hope everyone is get- ting outside and enjoying the warmer days and longer periods of sun—but being careful. Just last weekend (the first time we have been warm enough for the shorts to come out of the dresser drawers and it’s almost the end of May!) I had a conversation with a fellow flyer dressed in long sleeves, a one-piece jump suit, a broad-brimmed had and a ban- dana around his neck. He has developed sev- eral forms of skin cancers over the last few years and now has to dress for total protec- tion, so please remember to protect your- selves with sun-block and hats (I prefer broad-brimmed hats for ear protection). A thread on RCU in the jets forum by a re- tired dentist in Washington state back in January of 2009 (
http://tinyurl.com/nyusoj3) has some information and a photo series to let us all know how serious things can be. Be safe!
Also, it is the time of year our creepy- crawly blood-sucking friends come out to play. Can you guess how I feel about ticks, chiggers and mosquitos? Not only are they a nuisance, but they can also
carry and
spread disease. You do keep a can of Cut- ters, Off or some other repellant in you flight box, don’t you? I’m sure I am not the only one who feels that there is nothing worse than having the 15 mph wind drop to dead calm and have a swarm of gnats flying around your head while you try to see your plane somewhere up there. Okay, enough personal protection discussion. I won’t even bring up eye protection!
The future of military aviation keeps shifting like (insert your favorite phrase here) in the-wind. Just recently it moved closer to what we do with the successful car- rier launch (as well as touch-and-goes) of the X-47B demonstrator aircraft. Looking like a
by greg moore You can reach Greg Moore via e-mail at
jetflyr@comcast.net
PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKE WARREN
Pilots are the same the world over – show up with a camera and they (we) all want to see how our beauties look that day! Oh yeah, it’s also a good looking Hunter, which I remember seeing a real one fly “nap of the earth” up and over Mt. Titlis a few kilometers north … memories!
mini B-2, or an overly large model, the suc- cess of these tests moves un-manned avia- tion up the ladder a bit more. A Navy re- leased video (which I think is pretty cool) can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/m7h38rc. Moving on a bit, I have been following some
of John Morgan’s threads on RC Groups. He likes to build large models, and detail them like mad. His current build/blog thread can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/mfzjxf7 which will then link to his other threads. While not “jet” related, some of his building/molding/
detailing ideas, and the commentary from some very talented individuals makes for some “I didn’t know that” moments. It is very definitely worth some of your time to peruse his threads.
Another thread I’ve been following is the construction of a 76-inch long, twin 90mm edf Eurofighter with thrust vectoring. While using similar construction methods as John Morgan, but also having many different ideas as well, the number of problems that needed to be overcome has been large.
Greg noticed several items of interest in this install picture (above) of a Yellow Aircraft Starfire. The first is the use of canoe-shaped inlet reducers to decrease the ram-air effect of the oversized intakes (modern high performance edf does not need 140% fan-swept-area to work well), which is a simple (and esthetic) fix to a number of airframes. It also improves performance and speed by decreasing the frontal area/drag from the intakes. The second thing (besides the overall neatness) is the very large heat sink on this ESC which should keep the electronics happy. The large size of the Schübeler DS-94 HST (128mm rotor diameter) being held (at right) can be seen and contrasted with his smaller offerings. With the correct motor, this fan has been tested at over 23 pounds of thrust!
46 JUNE 2013
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