Roughly 1000' away?

Is it ok or not? Or just avoid flying under them?

I suppose its just like flying near trees, they wont do any damage to you but if the plane hits them your pretty stuffed no mattter if its a tree or a power line. 1000ft is a fair distance away .

Regards,

Troy.

kerdon,

1000 ft-minimum. Better yet, if you don't HAVE to fly on that side of the field, don't. A thousand feet can turn into 500-oops, I mean 150, oops !! I have seen people that thought they had "a couple hundred feet" HIT powerlines. Depending on the condition of the lines, and the type of covering/hardware you plane has, you could even cause an arc to jump from the lines-not good.

A year ago I saw a park flyer destroyed, and fortunately that was all, when a kid flew it near some low lines in the rear of a commercial parking lot. An arc jumped about 2 feet to the plane, which smoked all things electrical, and the resulting dive to the pavement below was terminal. -Not good.

Think about the same type of thing with a gas model.-Not good.

Jetts

At my field, the runway ends/begins adjacent to a dirt road, on the dirt road is powerlines, I was taught from the get go to land underneath the power lines. It sure teaches you to keep your approaches tidy. These arent the super duper 100 feet in the air lines either, standard telephone poles, and a pole is 10 feet from the runway edge.

Two incedents my club members recall, one park flyer hitting the wires, and a 40 sized plane exploding from a full speed impact.

We can land from the other side, but often the wind doesnt favor this. Is fun.


Just found pics of our field, didnt know they were out there, check it out: note the realflight pic, can see the pole location!! Also note, is a telephone box about 3 feet high actully in the middle of the beggining of the runway, had some close calls with that.

http://www.uvm.edu/~swarley/pine.htm


Mill

I used to fly glider contests that were pretty close to large power lines. The launch was actually close to them, launching away from them. If you popped off and looped backwards, it was really close. Didn't like it, but didn't see anyone have problems radio wise. Did see one guy land on the wires, but that was entirely his own fault. he flew along them thinking he was beside them, and actaully landed on them. What a mess for him getting the power company to retrieve the plane.

No problem,fly over them or avoid them,the plane will not win.

Mil,

When I still lived in the country, I had the same thing - 15 foot high power lines just beyond the runway. One of my friends who would drive out to fly there had a habit of hitting them. Once the pole, and 3 or 4 times his plane went"surffing" on the wire! Lucily the wires never fried his radio, just a few broken props and a missing tailwheel. Ever since then, we call him "Hydro".

These arent the 15-20 powerlines

these are 150-200 feet up really high voltage lines

"hYDRO" Huh? I think I might watch out for those ...what was I saying, oh yeah, power lines,sssssswt.

those big power lines would scare me even worse, funny thing is, I live on a farm and we have those running across our property, I occasionally fly off an access road of ours, and they scare me more then the little ones, even though alot easier to avoid.

P.S. horses don't like planes.



mill

Everyone,

For reference;

The big fat ones that are nearest the ground are telephone/cable lines. Not to dangerous.

The skinny, ratty ones that are at the top of the pole are the "nasty" ones. Can be very dangerous to plane/radio equipment, fire hazard being the worst.

The ones on the BIG towers are transmition lines, and carry the biggest kick. These CAN, and, WILL kick your a**, destroy your radio and plane, and can jump an arc far enough that you would be suprised.

Also as an added incentive to stay away, YOU are liable to damage that you cause with your plane, not cheap.

Jetts

One of the sites I fly at has high power lines about the same distance your talking about(1000'), we have never had any radio hits from them. Like was said earlier, do not fly too close to them.

Will be nice if someone can figure out how to get a in-flight fast charge out of these power lines for non-stop flying. LOL !

Am I missing the point here or was he just asking about the obstruction?

Power lines can give off massive amounts of Electromagnetic Energy Fields (EMF). Could these fields interfere with our radio gear, causing glitches, or unwanted tendencies? I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to fly next to any so can’t answer the question, but would think the possibility to be there. Thoughts?

D othe power lines cause radio interference in some frequencies.

We fly close to a power station & we notice interference with some frequencies particularly in the 30's with the FM radio.

Regards.

Arjun

Transformers on poles some times will cause glitches if they are going bad. Power plants have a lot of transformers.

I personally have seen powerlines claim models. Both because of physical contact, and from interference.
I also would not want to be the "test mule" to find out how far from them you have to get before my transmitter antenna became the "negative pole".
While were on the subject, Lightning can travel for MILES. Don't even think about standing in the middle of an open field with your lightning rod-er, I mean, transmitter antenna out when the weather looks bad.

Jetts

For a fun experiment, get a couple of flourescent tubes and stand under a high power line. Lights them right up.

In theory, it should be posible to recharge from them while in flight by creating one half of a transformer coil & a rectification circuit, then flying parallel to the wire. The closer you get, the more efficient the transformer would work. However, to get a precise charge, you would need to calculate the right number of turns in your "transformer" coil based upon the voltage in the wire, the distance between the wire and the plane, and the speed of the plane.

Want a faster charge? Fly closer... I don't intend to test this theory though.

Aeronaut : Most of our electricity here comes from Hydro-Electric power dams, so we call the poles "Hydro Poles". Hence my friend's nickname "Hydro".

As chance might have it, this same site also had the high power transmission lines along-side it, about 600 feet away. We never experienced any RF interference from them, but maybe we just got lucky. I personally have had a plane get about 100 feet from the high power lines, without glitching, using an AM radio, due to a brief loss of depth perception while avoiding a suicidal pilot's plane (he almost hit himself with his own plane while trying to land).

Just to let you know Dave, it is very possible to have radio interference from high power lines and a simple light pole for that matter. A lot has to do with whether the polls have good grounding. Like a lot of RF interference it may only affect one frequency. If no one has ever used that frequency at your field you would never know the difference. I do not know at what range this interference would occur but I do know it is some distance before you get to the poles or lines and it is usually very selective.

:drowning:
Ace

Just speaking off the top of my head without any hard experience:

I would imagine that power line harmonics wouldn't cause too much of a problem...I doubt that they would be at high enough intensity at 72 MHz to be an issue. My guess is that the biggest issue would be that the power line could act as a giant antenna, and if there are any transmitters not too far down the line and close enough to it, the power lines could carry the signal some distance. This is where good grounding could make a big difference.

Of course, that's just my guess and my area isn't in Power Systems, so I have no idea if the lines have any sort of other issues. My area is in RF but I am only a grad student and not a practicing engineer so I could be wrong.

And if you actually fly into the lines and short two or three out, you will have a nice vaporized airplane pretty quickly and interference will be a moot point.