Monday, October 8th on the science channel there is a show where they will crash an airliner to see what happens. The best I can tell by the preview is that a person will take off in the plane, once up and level they switch to RC control, the guy will jump out and parachute down. A small plane will fly behind the big one with a RC Tx and then crash it. But it looks like they are using a Futaba T8FG for control of the big plane.
They had to use Futaba. If you use Spektrum, you know it's going to crash, but you can't say for sure where. ...Tiger
Then a Spektrum powered helicopter went looking for the lost Futaba and at the vast distance of 150' feet away it went into failsafe and almost crashed into the cow poo.
This show was pretty good, although a few things that could have been better. One funny thing too, the very first words spoken by the narrater were "In a desert just South of the American border...." I instantly knew why this was. There is no way the FAA would have issued a COA for this in the USA. But in Mexico you just pay money and can do whatever you want. The mission was mostly a success, just landed short of the crash site, and at a less than desired speed of impact. Overall pretty good. But the so called RC expert did not install the system as reliable as any of us would have. They were very limited on range because the Rx was inside of the metal plane! Should have mounted the Rx outside, they only had 150' feet of range and had to fly the chase plane just off the wing of the airliner. And no FPV camera or OSD to have any idea as to how fast the plane was flying. I just dont know where these experts get the expert title?
I've found a little info on it if didn't get to watch the show. [youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W--dC5kuQ8Q[/youtube]
Thanks for the video Bill. I was looking forward to a fireball and some explosions which didn't happen. I agree with Pelagic Pilot, especially when they said they planned it for four years. Could have been better controlled and some more cameras unless they have not shown everything yet.
4 years of planning and they waited until there were only 5 days left on the permit to do this, the first RC test flight occured 4 days before the expiration with no chance to renew it. Once expired the project would have ended in failure. So with a 4 day window they find out the chase plane was too slow, the RC had no range, then the new faster plane lost a fuel pump and they had to go back to a slow plane to chase with...... 4 years of planning from the highest qualified experts in the world....... 4 days to work the bugs out.........
