Real Cool Flying B52

[jlseymour]

Everyone need one of these!!!
JL Seymour

http://www.mcgirt.net/RC/VIDEOS/Giant_B52/B52_flight2.wmv

[Dave P]

That is one cool aircraft. JL, do you know any specifics? Has it got eight engines?

Thanks for posting that. I love that stuff!

[jlseymour]

No, That had to be a killer, So Sad...
Dave I don't know much, there was an info on the page before the flight
Jerry

[LesHolmes]

Wow, what a great machin!

Nice takeoff and flying. Beautiful landing.

When I was an Air Force weather forecaster at Ellington AFB, Houston, Texas, in the late 1960s I sometimes went to the Houston Spacecraft Center on Sunday afternoons to watch the NASA engineers fly their radio controlled planes. The video reminded me of that time long ago.

Thank you.

[Dave P]

That's heart breaking. Enough to make a grown man cry.

[ihsfab]

Watching that thing fly was awsome!

[KurtB]

That's heart breaking. Enough to make a grown man cry.

Dave, are you referring to the crash of this magnificent model? I hate to break this news if it's not known, but this incredible scale B-52 crashed (and yes burned) not too long after that movie was filmed.

It took a team an incredible amount of time, work, and $$ to take the project to the flying stage. It used 8 small turbines of about 10 lb thrust each. IIRC the model weighed about 200 lb, which still gave it a very good 0.4 thrust/weight.

The turbines looked like this:
http://www.5bears.com/gtpics/frun3.jpg

The last I heard, the team was going to try again. I don't think anything was salvaged from the first crash. Guys that do this have real guts, to put their work at risk every time they fly.

[Dave P]

That's what I was talking about. I thought there was a posting with a link to the crash. Can't find it now.

I thought it looked and sounded like eight turbines. People that build scale airplanes and engravers have a lot more in common than it would appear at first glance. The attention to detail is truly amazing often at a microscopic level. One small screw up in design can ruin something of significant value in a heart-beat if not caught in a timely manner. It can take months and months to do something that someone else will look at for thirty seconds and say, "That's pretty cool. Bet I could do that."

Sound familiar?

I bet the team that built that plane was already planning their next version before even leaving the flying field. That's just the way guys that do that kind of thing are. Guess you kind of have to be, or you wouldn't do it.

Thanks for the info, Kurt.