Another 'Evening with floats'

lake_flyer · Sep 9, 2016

Another 'Evening with Floats'.
Tonight I had just half an hour before the sun would set, again waiting for folks to clear the beach behind my house. Such a beautiful evening.

I needed some shots to test a cinematic score I composed and recorded yesterday night (couldn't sleep before I recorded what I had in my head). The score is 4 minutes long.

A very nice German boat owner started to talk to me and took most of my flying time. Unfortunately I had only 5 minutes of flight in total and maybe 3 minutes worth of OK-ish footage.
It was a great conversation however, and we decided to have a couple of beers tomorrow. He told me he had never seen such an advanced looking drone before, he didn't recognise anything about the I1 because of the bulky blue floats of course. It looks pretty mean indeed.

This is just a tryout to see how this piece of music would fit under a clip. Nothing serious, and the music is still only 24 hours old, work in progress so to speak. I recorded every track using a Kurzweil PC3x keyboard workstation (who cares). Again, still rough and the ending is not yet how I want it. The video clip is just a quick job with the little usable footage I had. Shot in 4K, rendered into 1080p.

The I1 performed, again, wonderfully with the version 2 floats. There were more waves this time, as you can clearly see them rolling under the Inspire with camera only inches above the surface. In a full speed leg, low over the water I noticed I had to keep the throttle up a bit. It was descending very very slowly, but that's expected because the floats create a larger bubble of low pressure, influencing the barometer.

Anyway, here's 'An evening with floats'.

Dobmatt · Sep 10, 2016

lake_flyer said:
... In a full speed leg, low over the water I noticed I had to keep the throttle up a bit. It was descending very very slowly, but that's expected because the floats create a larger bubble of low pressure, influencing the barometer.

Indeed, I noticed the same, although I'm not sure this behavior is related only to a turbulence created by floats. Flying fast with landing gear lowered does that as well, to a degree.

lake_flyer · Sep 10, 2016

Dobmatt said:
Indeed, I noticed the same, although I'm not sure this behavior is related only to a turbulence created by floats. Flying fast with landing gear lowered does that as well, to a degree.

With the gear down (with or without floats), the barometer is above the props. The pressure above the props is always lower than below the props, so it is reading a lower pressure and thinks it's higher than it actually is. If you lower the gear, you see this even while hovering, it adjusts to the lower pressure and descends about 1 meter. Raising the gear does the opposite. The pressure becomes higher around the barometer so it ascends a meter. Also, with the gear down it produces more drag than with gear up in a forward motion, so again, this will have an effect on the (pressure)altitude, until it settles at a constant speed.

The I1 is following its own fixed barometer pressure altitude (set to the actual pressure at startup), just like an airliner flying on autopilot at flight level altitude, following the air layers with the pressure it is set on (1013.25 hPa at sea level), ascending and descending while the altimeter doesn't show any or very little vertical speed.