BA Inaugural Flight Class in McCarren Park.

Here are a few images of the Adult/Child teams in the park for their first launch.

Breck buddy-boxes with all teams for more practice time in the air.

Retrieval and repair are half the experience in the beginning…

Wrenching in the field

…and innovation abounds!

Innovative tape strap.

Our Maker friend Rick was in town with his air-powered rocket so much aerodynamic fun was had by all:

Rocket Rick!

Due to popular request, Breck gave a demo on El Wire for night flying at the end of class:

Breck wraps up with el wire

Video of this class will be embedded here and available on YouTube asap, thanks for your patience!

Images and video of our Adult Build and Night Fly class from the last 2 Tuesdays are COMING SOON.

The next 2 weeks are busy with BA prep for Maker Faire Detroit happening July 28th-29th, but we will be back with more classes in mid-August so anybody stranded in the tri-boro area for the summer take note!

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Brooklyn Aerodrome’s Inaugural Round of Classes

Hazzah!
BA has completed its first round of classes and we have had a
ball. A visual narrative of the classes below and video of all
the fun coming up…

First up, the Adult/Child Build Class:

The teams in this class were quite the speedy builders! Very impressive.

Radios out! Very exciting.

First flights to follow!

BA

The Blue Manta

And so the sea takes to the air as we humans always feared it would….behold the blue manta in sketchup form:

Karen’s idea, Breck’s execution….and here it is flying:

Brooklyn Aerodrome at Maker Faire in Westport Connecticut, April 28 2012

Karen and Breck headed up to the Maker Faire in Westport for a very fun day of flying and talking to people. Some pictures below:

Nice spot to spend a spring day eh?

Here is Breck delivering the “spiel” after a demo flight.

I did most of my flying over the parking lot. Here is a classic bank and yank turn. It was fairly blustery so landings were a challenge.

I generally tried to hand catch the plane since I didn’t want to land on asphalt. With the turbulence it was a challenge.

Planes of the Brooklyn Aerodrome–Pointy 2d Flying Heart

The pointy 2d flying heart is an elaboration of the 3-d version yet to be perfected. But a simplification it is not since we decided to up the “heartiness” of it by making the prop hole heart shaped as well. The plane was built for the Escape to New York festival in the Hamptons this summer (2011) on the Shinnecock reservation.

Some photos:

The template

It has about the same square inches as a regulation Towel, 500 or so, but I was really worried about center of gravity issues and the performance of the wing with such a big cut out.

The heart parts cut out of foam and covered in purple metallic covering

I had balloon fabric in purple that I thought would look good so used 3m77 to attach to foam before cutting. These are the initial cutouts for the wing and stabilizer. I usually do a prototyping pass without decoration for “radical” models but I was pretty sure this would fly and was low on time.

Will it balance or not? CG test with major components attached with tape.

The CG issues proved manageable. A bunch of logistic details were handled on the fly–NASA this is not. Like how to get the tail to not be a huge issue on landing. Also, reinforcements for a pretty floppy airframe.

It all worked out–here is the first flight:

Post flight interview, turns out I was not so confident that it would fly after all. It is weird but my hands still shake to this day out of nervousness on test flights for radical designs. Usually the second flight is when I get the shakiest. First flight is all business, but the confirmation flight is a different matter. Interesting experience.