Aviation MegaThread!!!!

With all the recent aviation threads and vast number if armchair top guns here I figured its time for a thread for general aviation talk and interests.

You can post anything related to flight in this thread.

Military/civilian, helicopters, gyros, ultralights, hang gliding, gliders, powered chutes, RC, show us yours/father's/grandfather's/neighbor's/friend's projects, tell us about your careers in commercial and military aviation, ask questions. Anything and everything.







To start things off I'll walk you through the construction of the Fokker D.VII parkflyer my father and brother in-law got me for christmas.



To start you have to install the ailerons on the tips of the upper wing. They use these tin pieces of paper similar to thick wax paper, but more fiberous. You slide them into slots in the wing and flappy pieces and put a couple of dabs of CA glue on them, wait for them to dry, crack'em and you've got a hinge. (The right side is already done, left is still taped in place.)



Next we attach the lower wing to the fuselage.



There we go.



Now for the rear control surfaces.



To attach the horizontal stab I sliced the shrinkwrap off of the top of the attachment point and peel the shrinkwrap off of the same spot on the stab itself. After tracing the area to be peeled, I used a 20w soldering iron to score along the trace marks and make it easier to peel.



Looking good.



Nicely done.



In between the last pic and this one. I ran into a problem. They didn't give me enough of those CA hinges. So I took a 15-20min break to think about my options. As I lounged around chowing down on a peanut butter cup. It struck me. The card stock they put the cups on inside of the package is strangely similar to the paper CA hinges. Just a little thicker and nontransparent. So I washed it off, nuked it for 30sec to dry it out and voila! They work perfectly, in fact, I think they maybe stronger than the regular hinges.

Rear controls assembled!!



Onto the electronics!

Gots me a fancy rimfire motor!



Now to solder on some different connectors to the speed controller to match.



What do you think Gramps?



Looks like it'll work out fine.



Controller goes in along with the reciever and motor.



Motor installed. (Whoa, a little too close.)



A ran into another issue where I needed a special harness to connect the servos in the upper wing to the recievers. After a few days and several failed missions, I was able to swing by the local RC guru and pick one up. Along with a matching reciever crystal so I can use it with my radio.

Unfortunately I forgot to snap some pictures, but you have to install the special harness by using a string already threaded through the wing structure from one servo bay to the other to pull the harness through. Turns out the string wasn't threaded through properly and I lost one end of it inside the wing. So I had to find a way to rethread it.

Hmm.... Maybe out here in the hobby junkyard?



Ah, yes. What's left of my Hanger 9 F22.





But I digress, there's nothing here of use to me.

...Maybe in the garage.

Hmm....



HUZZAH! This'll work nicely.



Onto the string.



...and through the wing.



Wing servos installed.



But in the process I accidentally knocked one of the ailerons off. No problem, Ill just dig the peanut butter cup paper out of the trash. Cut a few small pieces and...


whoops







*ahem* Well I did fix it, eventually.

Onto the inside servos!



Time to attach the top wing!







Yes. Yes. Its all coming together!



There.



Now for the landing gear.



Almost there.



DONE!



Can't wait to get out there and dogfight my father in-law's SE5!


And now I turn the floor over to you folks!

****cough*****

***ahem***


well, I got a cool RC helicopter the other day from Big Lots for $15.. Ran great till the battery went dead, it augered in and snapped the tailbone...

Call me a retro grouch but I still build my RC aircraft from plans and wood......

I respect those who do a lot. I just wouldn't be able to stomach putting all that effort into and have it up for 5 min before it turns into a lawndart.

Just the r/c side of my aviation hobbies for now. Picked this up last weekend:



Parkzone Vapor, .4 ounces, runs on a 1 cell 3.7v LiPo, rudder and elevator. Can do prop hangs, stall turns, loops, high alpha flight, and I can fly it upside down in my work's iWerks (IMax) theater.

Not me, but an idea:
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUIDulaIq5E&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUIDulaIq5E&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

My BIL gave me a nice calendar for XMess with pictures of WW II planes. Thats aviation related isn't it?

Cool thread. It will grow.

Back when Microsoft used to host Fighter Ace online I was pretty damn good. I could strafe the enemy runway 20 feet off the ground at 250 knots quite accurately, fly off beyond the runway a nautical mile or two, pull an Immelman, and dive right back on the field for another pass. Eventually I got to where I wouldn't even pull the Immelman, I'd just loop and fly upside down about 20 feet off the runway, guns blazing. That was particularly humiliating to the enemy. But ultimately I figured out a better tactic.

The P38 - being a tricycle gear airplane - was capable of massive destruction to my teammates and their airplanes because it shot level on the ground, while every other plane was a tail dragger and couldn't shoot you when on the ground. And let's face it, what can possibly be more fun than friendly fire? So I'd get in my P38, pick one unsuspecting teammate, position myself so I was aimed at his spawning point, and each time he appeared all it took was a couple of seconds of well placed machine gun fire to cause the big bang and subsequent bright flash of fiery death by friendly fire. It was so gratifying! I used to do this over and over, with my teammates screaming at me through the chat window telling me I was ruining their war. Their war? This was MY war! The chatter of my machine guns, the explosions, the anger. Man, did that used to give me a woody. Or a steely, as in blue steel - the cat couldn't have scratched it.

Man, I miss that game. Thanks for the memories!

I fly RC electric Scale models my interest is mainly WWI and pre WWI aircraft.

I also make flight sim models both RC and full scale, I have about 20 models uploaded to RC Sim.de some recent piccies.





I also did a not very much appreciated sim model for cRaSH and AnnieGS of their Yellow-Bee, I assume they don't want it now...:huh



My full scale stuff is done for Targetware, I'm on the development team for Richthofen's Skies. Something fun I did recently was to make a drivable WWI era Tramp Steamer with a couple of anti aircraft hard points, a Lewis AA MG and a 2 pounder auto cannon. I modeled the steam engine drive using some tweaked flight modelling files. This was originally a static "scenery" file. Now you can get into the cabin and take it for a spin.





Some of my RS aircraft. I've just recently finished an RAF RE8 and FE4,
and I'm working on a FE2b and a Farman F40. I also have about a half dozen pre WWI pioneer aircraft.
















I have a big data base of model images on another website but unfortunately when they're linked here, they only last a couple of hours before being deleted or something.. I'm tired of transferring stuff to photo bucket....

This thread is making me miss Red Baron 3D. I loved that game .

I play with FS2004 almost every day.

I have 32 years in aircraft manufacturing, with the last 15 in Tool Engineering and AOG parts fab. One of my favorite planes I have worked on from start to finish is the Mustang. I think we're up to full production of this plane now, at 150 per year, at $3.2M each.

DAMN Bake!


That sumbitch is suhWEET!

that whole battery story---was that for one of these planes?





dang sweet ride..

It's actually still being played. There's a ton of new free add-ons. Check out this link, http://www.swwisa.net/ if you still have your old RedBaron3D game CD, upload the latest version of The Western Front Patch from SWWISA's archives.

Right seat view


Front view


Transferred from some slides that I re-discovered this summer.

Stinson Model A tri-motor? Sweet!

Which part of "this is MY war" don't you simpletons understand?

muguvian's photo of the fighters chasing a test tomahawk cruise missile made me want to post this photo.

This is where I used to work years ago. These are Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACM) in the final assembly room. This was at General Dynamics, San Diego.
I wrote software that planned the missions (SIOP) for these. Sounds all glamorous and stuff, it wasnt really, the funny part was knowing that if these baby's ever flew, it meant global nuclear war was occurring!
At the time this photo was taken this photo was classified.


The wings on these are swept forward to reduce the radar cross section (stealthy)
http://www.cdi.org/issues/nukef&f/database/acm.jpg