Lnewqban

The first posts and pictures of this thread show an interesting Aerodynamics experiment of visualization:

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/rc-p...alisation.html

BMatthews

Interesting? Most certainly. New? Not so much. Full size aircraft have been using wool tufts to investigate airflow over their planes for years. But these days with the ready availability of keychain and stick pen video cameras the same technique is now open to modellers like never before.

The trick to making this more useful for analysis would be to coordinate a pilot's comments with the airborne video. One way would be to start an audio recorder at the beginning of the flight and with both camera and recorder going the pilot says "Start" or something suitable and at the same time does something in the camera view at the same time. From then on the flight comments can be keyed to the airflow behaviour and some pretty interesting analysis could be done.

For example it would be fascinating to see a video of these fuselage tufts during knife edge flight in both camera high and camera low directions. Or from the tail post during either direction.

sensei

Interesting? Well it was back in the late 70s and early 80s when we were still running flight test out at Dryden Flight Research...

Bob