Why It Might Be a Good Idea to Register Drones

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

At some point in the not-too-distant future, all those Christmas-gift quadrotors and Star Wars replica drones will be joined by medium-size burger bombers and two-hour-guaranteed delivery aerial vehicles for fast food restaurants and on-line retailers sending their wares to a landing zone near your front door, or perhaps the roof of your apartment.  This probably isn’t what Alfred Lord Tennyson had in mind when he wrote: ” For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; “Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;”   (From Locksley Hall, 1835) There are already rules governing drone flight, but no tests for competence of pilots, who will be often untrained, unaware, or uncaring. For larger drones and commercial flights, we can probably expect stringent rules, but for the growing number of amateurs unaware of the …

Smart Skies Down Under

Dean Sigler Diesel Powerplants, Electric Powerplants 1 Comment

Mr Richard R. Glassock holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with honors, and supervises undegraduate unmanned aerial vehicle projects at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA). He currently leads the “Smart Skies” unmanned aerial systems flight-testing program and is working on his Master’s Thesis. At the Twenty-Fourth Bristol International Unmanned Air Vehicle Systems Conference, in 2009, Bristol United Kingdom he presented a detailed paper on a parallel hybrid system using off the shelf model aircraft components he and his associates designed and tested. “Multimodal Hybrid Powerplant for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Robotics” shows the use of an OS 10 cc model airplane engine, combined with a Plettenberg 220 motor. His group found that climb rates of the combined powerplants were improved 56 percent over that for an internal-combustion engine only, and that endurance increased by 13 percent, based on the combined efficiencies of the hybrid components. Richard is a regular reader of …