Some of our group got to wondering what the stunt pattern would look like if you were riding along in the airplane and now we're on our way to finding out. Several of us kicked in the money for a small color video camera and transmitter and one of our more techno-savvy members, Bob Reeves, is doing all of the installation and flying. The first attempt was using an old Dancing Girl Bipe that had been recently refurbished. The cockpit provided a good place near the CG to mount the transmitter and the camera was mounted on a pod strapped under the wing a little off to one side to minimize any interference from shooting through the prop. The set up proved the system would work but the added weight degraded performance enough that the plane couldn't do the entire pattern. The next step is to put the system in a second hand Sig Magnum that should be able to handle the weight increase. The plane has been fitted with a Stalker 61 and a few test flights without the camera has proven the plane is a decent flyer and just needed a little flap tweaking and wingtip weight adjustment to get it trimmed out well. Hopefully we'll get to try out the new plane with the camera on board this weekend or next. Other things we are hoping to try is shooting a clear plastic fuel tank as the plane goes through the pattern to see just exactly how the fuel moves around in the tank, and shooting the tail of a profile ship to see how much twisting of the fuselage occurs.

Elwyn:

Now you've done it. You've dug yourself into a whale of a big hole.

But.

Post a link to the resulting videos and we'll lend you a ladder.

Haw.

Looking forward to seeing the pictures.

Bill.

If we can get enough decent footage we were thinking of possibly putting together a video tape to sell to help pay for a small portable building to use as a clubhouse. If our webmaster can put up some footage I'll definitely post a link here. To bad there won't be any audio. One thing that became obvious on the first test is that the horizon is tilted when you do any maneuvers since you're flying in a hemisphere. The sun shining straight into the lens causes a little problem but Bob thinks he can adjust the camera to mimimize it.

Got this photo from Bob today. The second photo ship is ready for action and now we're just waiting on the weather to cooperate. Using a plane with an inverted engine and having the camera out on the wing a bit should help keep exhaust residue off the lens. The ideal set-up would probably be a tuned pipe. The black area in front of the cockpit is the battery pack and the transmitter is under the canopy, and yes there is a little area missing on the back of the rudder but it doesn't affect the flight performance. This was a second hand ship ( we don't even know who built it ) that was a little rough in spots and the main concern was that it be functional and looks weren't a high priority. The wheels are plastic discs with a groove around the edge that a large O-ring fits in. They came with the plane.

Elwyn:

Whatever airplane it is, it's pretty.

Bill.

The airplane was fairly light(around 62 OZ sans camera) even though the top block wasn't hollowed out. Bob said there was a minimal finish on it which probably helped keep the weight down. The finish does get a little sticky when fuel gets on it so we're not sure what kind of paint was used. Bob did repaint the nose since he had to go in from the top when refitting the plane to use a different engine. There are a few dark stains here and there on the finish that defied removal using normal cleaners so Bob let them stay. The plane came with a lower cowl but it hasn't been modified to fit the new engine.

Well the weather was sunny and calm early Sunday so Bob brought out the Magnum camera plane for it's first test with the camera on board. It went so well it was almost anticlimactic. The plane didn't even know the camera was there. The image would flicker a little now and then but nothing too bad. There was some stobing effect on the prop and it looked like you could tell when the rpm's changed. After shooting a flight looking forward Bob turned the camera around to shoot the elevator and flaps. This looked even better than shooting forward. It's amazing how little elevator movement is used during a loop. A hard corner used quite a bit more movement. Can't wait to see the footage on a full screen. We only had a 3" monitor at the field.
After watching the video on a big screen, Bob reports the camera was slow to recover after the sun passses through the field of view so plans are to do more video taping on a day when we have some cloud cover.

Bob Reeves is quite an interesting, enthusiastic guy. If I recall correctly, he just returned to Control Line flying within the last three or four years. In addition to the "eye in the sky" experiments, he built an innovatively modified SIG Twister aptly named Twistmaster which looks a great deal like a larger, flapped Ringmaster. It's a good looking plane that, I've read, is an excellent flying profile plane.

In addition, when just getting restarted, he developed the web site, Stunt Stats, a listing of as many CL stunt planes with their specifications as he could remember. He has added planes, specs, etc., as he's had time. Bob hasn't had much time to update it lately, but it's still a valuable resource. Maybe some of the "old" hands here might have some more information to submit to Bob to help him with this. Check it out at:

[link=http://www.eaglextra.com/index.htm]Stunt Stats[/link]

Elwyn, since you fly with Bob, feel free to correct anything I've written here.

Paul

Elwyn,

How did you get the photo posted in the body of this message? I've looked for a Help section that would explain to me how to accomplish this, but so far I haven't found it.

Thanks.

Paul

Yes, Bob's really jumped back in to C/L with a vengeance. He will probably be using his Twistmaster to do the fuel tank video and the video to see how much flexing occurs in the tail of a profile fuselage as it goes through the pattern. The Magnum didn't appear to have any discernible flex in the tail but that's what you would expect in a built up fuselage.

When putting in a photo with the original message click on Upload Images". When I added a photo in a later edit I clicked on "Upload More Files". A new window should open up which enables you to find the file on your computer. Locate the file you need and click on it. Next click "Open". A window should open with the correct file showing. Click OK. If the file uploads correctly a new window should open up with just OK in the center. Click on this OK and the window should close. Then click on the OK to the left of the Preview button. The message should appear in the forum shortly thereafter.

Bob brought the camera toting Magnum out again this weekend and put up two successful flights. On one flight the plane was just puttering along doing a 6.5 second lap but Bob was still able to complete the pattern. There was still some "noise" evident in the video, but Bob had tweaked the camera and has gotten it to a minimum. On Sunday Bob brought out his Twistmaster with the camera attached and filmed the fuel tank going through a full pattern and then turned the camera around and filmed the flaps and tail. The Twistmaster weighed in at 47 OZ with the camera on board which is a lot of weight for a 500 sq in wing on a C/L stunter. Fortunately Bob had recently re-engined the plane with a 40 four stroke so there was plenty of oomph to haul the increased weight. The small muffler on the 4-stroke concentrated the exhaust and on the video looking to the rear it kind of looked like he had a smoke system. There seemed to be less "noise" problems with the video when shooting toward the rear for some reason. Maybe it relates to shooting through the prop in some way. Can't wait to see it on a full sized screen.

O K! Bob has put a short bit of video on the web so you can get a sneak peek at what's been goin' on.



If you have a fast connection it won't be a big problem but if you are on dial-up even at 56k be prepared for a long download. The easiest way to get the file is to Right Click on the link and select <Save Target As> and make a mental note of where on your hard drive you saved it to. After the download you should be able to use Windows Explorer to navigate to the file. A double click on the file should bring up Windows Media Player and play the AVI. Here's a frame from the video with the plane at the top of the circle. We were shooting the fuel as it reacted to the various g-forces as the plane went through the stunt pattern.

http://www.eaglextra.com/images/WINGOVER.AVI

Fascinating!

Elwyn:

Pity there's no sound. Otherwise very good.

Longer would be nice, too.

Bill.

Sound would be great but the added complexity and weight of the equipment the airplane would have had to carry ruled it out. It would have added considerable size to the AVI file of the preview video also. On a dial-up connection this little bit of video still takes about 45 minutes to download.
Bob Reeves recently started a discussion about the project over on Stuka Stunt Works and you can read some more about it there if you want. If it isn't permissable to put links in here to other forums just delete this part.

http://www.clstunt.com/htdocs/dcforu...mID1/6478.html

Elwyn:

Links for sharing information are fine.

Bill.

Bob has procured some new equipment and plans are(probably next spring at the earliest) to try recording some more flights directly to a DVD format which should allow more editing ability and have everything on discs instead of video tape. Bob also says he has found some light enough equipment to allow recording sound on the airplane.

We got to playing around with airborne video again recently. One of our clubmembers was given a little camera to try out that was a little smaller and lighter than the set-up Bob Reeves was using earlier. The whole thing probably didn't add an ounce and a half to the airplane. We never got around to trying a flight looking back at the pilot in the earlier tests so that's what we tried first. Mounting was simple. I just made a crude mount that bolted to the side of a profile fuselage with the 9V battery going on the other side of the fuselage. The first attempts proved fairly successful with the image getting an occasional blip but not bad considering the equipment. We're getting a lot more blips in the image on the latest flights. Thought it might have been a weak battery but a new one didn't improve anything. We'll have to do some troubleshooting. The camera looks out over the left wing and when flying upright the pilot is visible from the waist up. Inverted the pilot is completely visible and it looks like you're flying under a big spinning disc. Sharp turns when doing squares or triangles really are noticeable. We thought you might be able to see what the lines were doing( how much bow, etc.) but you coudn't see them at all. Perhaps moving the camera out near the wing-tip might provide a view to what the lines are doing during a flight. We probably didn't learn anything useful yet but it was fun playing around with it Maybe we will try mounting it up on the rudder next!

Elwyn, it sounds like you guys are having too much fun. So when is the DVD going to be ready and how much? I did see the video that vicstunt had on their site. It is something. Later, DOC Holliday

Bob had plans to do some more taping with the fancier equipment, but recording it straight to DVD instead of video to hopefully give a format that was edited easier. He had a change of residence that put everything on hold for the time being. Our latest exploits were just a lark and I don't know if we'll be offering any copies for sale. We still have some videos of the earlier stuff for sale if you're interested.

Great results, Grant Hiesand and myself did some still and video photography from our sport and scale models several years ago. We mounted 8mm video cameras and 35mm still cameras to airplanes and then flew in formation. We never did aerobatics, especiially with a 3 lbs camera attached to my camera plane. I'll find some of the pictures I got and post them. Great job...

Looking forward to seeing them. Someone out in California posted some pictures several years ago of a big hershey bar winged C/L ship with no rudder and a 35MM camera mounted on top of the fuselage. I think he could change the direction the camera was pointed. It definitely didn't look like something you'd want to try any aerobatics with. He had some nice sharp photos though. One pic looking back toward the center of the circle looked like he was on 200 foot lines. On the camera I'm playing with I'm going to remove the plug-in connection on the line going to the battery and see if we can get better results. We keep getting lots of interruptions in the signal and one of our members suggested that vibration might be screwing up the connection. I'd like to try mounting the camera up on the vertical stab. Just playing around with the camera at home it looks like the field of view will include about 2/3 of the wings with the fuselage visible from just behind the canopy forward. Don't know how much of a problem exhaust residue hitting the lens might be.