Monday, December 21, 2009

Yak-54 UAS Flights 3, 4, and 5 Complete


McMurdo Station, Antarctica. We completed the third, fourth, and fifth flights of our Yak-54 unmanned aircraft system on Thursday, December 17 and Friday, December 18. The third flight consisted of an orbiting waypoint, where the aircraft circles around a fixed point, followed by a box-shaped mission. All of the waypoints in the first flight were on the opposite side of the runway from the ground station, essentially simulating a standard right closed traffic pattern. The fourth and fifth missions were also-box shaped, but were centered at the ground station so that the aircraft was flying around the ground crew. This allowed us to increase the size of the pattern while keeping the aircraft close to the ground station. This is important for the first Meridian flights as we like to ensure that we have the ability to take manual control at any point in the flight. This isn't something that we will need past the second or third flight of the Meridian, but is a nice backup in the event that the autopilot has any problems.

We have concluded the majority of the Yak-54 flights and moved on to getting the Meridian ready. We pulled the aircraft out of the hangar on Sunday, December 20 to balance the propeller. This consists of performing several engine run-ups while adding small weights to the spinner. While we had the engine running we also performed some avionics systems tests and everything is looking good. Once the propeller was balanced, we performed a weight and balance then had to push the aircraft back in the hangar because the weather was too bad to fly. We had been getting lucky with excellent weather until now. On Monday the Meridian was bathed in Antarctic snow (shown left) as we performed our final avionics checks.

1 comment:

  1. Congratulations on the first flight! Great way to end the year and begin a new one!

    John Hunter

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