What’s Happening at JPA

The next flight on deck is the Tandem airship.  Poor Tandem keeps getting bumped back for paying gigs.  We have a tight weather window left.  By the end of November the winds aloft will be up over 100 mph and the low morning surface winds will be gone.  Tandem is capable of flying in pretty harsh conditions but we want a calm day for the first flight. If the weather goes bad the flight will need to wait till spring. However, the team is pushing hard to get it in this year.

Last night we stripped down the vehicle and did a complete reweighing of all components.  We’re making upgrade to all the systems and this weekend reintergration will start.

The boom and chair make these vehicles pretty tricky to get into the air.

Here are some of the original concept drawings for the Away 39-42 missions.

This picture shows us tuning the  configuration.  Everything is hanging from the ceiling. The vehicle, boom and chair all needed to be balanced.  We need to be sure to keep oscillations low and that any swings would be dampened, pretty tricky with long boom with a camera on the end.  On top of that the camera needed to be pointed at the chair at all times, sounds simple but….

The flight chairs weren’t much heaver then our placeholder foamcore chair.  There were made in a movie studio model shop.  Even inches away you couldn’t tell them from real chairs until you picked them up. The wood was all balsa with hollow sections and the cushions were fabric over balsa frames.  We worried all the time about someone accidentally sitting on one!

Four flight, four recoveries, Eight fully loaded HD video recorders!

We made it to 98,000 feet, 93,000 feet, 94,000 feet and 82,000 feet. The best part is when the director, producer and fifteen other assorted customer folks let out a great cheer when they played the peak altitude footage.

It was all pretty amazing, one of the directors of Batman was our director for the shoot. I’ll write all the details we soon as we finish unpacking.

The team is just about ready to roll to the desert for our flights for Toshiba. We’re been carrying nine completely bleeding edge, and very cool HD video camera systems. The video will be stunning. Were launching four vehicles in all.

Toshiba has setup a site for a mission and will be tweeting live:

www.wherewillitland.com

We’re be a few days in the desert. As soon as we get back I’ll post the adventure.

Wish us luck!

JP

(Before anybody gets worried were flying commercial frequencies on this one.)

It’s very easy to get too keyed up before a flight.  Do to poor planning, last minute mission changes or just plain need to unwind I always find myself making rigging at midnight just hours before we roll to the desert.There’s something about tying knots, hooking up swivels and ‘D’ rings that just calms the mind.  There are nine sets to build tonight, five primary and four backups.

For those of you doing high altitude work, remember your rigging should be your only single thread failure point, literally and figuratively.  So send everyone out of the building, put on some good music, let out a deep breath and make your rigging.

Last Thursday the shop was converted into a TV studio.  The last part of a documentary on JPA was filmed.