Doppler Wind Lidars for UAS flight path planning and energy extraction

Walt:

So if I got this right, DoD is paying for someone to develop an expensive piece of hardware that will weigh in around 10 Kgs and do electronically what we now spend years learning to do with the human brain? Look out the window and figure out where the next source of lift is likely to be located?

If it works as well as Ramy's finely honed skills it will kill the sport. Or at least change it beyond recognition.

When I first came into this sport there was discussion of a device called THEMI that was supposed to tell us which way to turn in order to core a thermal. Some 35 years later I don't hear anything at all about that technology.

I'm not saying the developers should stop taking DoD's coin to make the Global Hawk stay in the air longer, just wondering if this will go the way of THEMI. snark off

It won't kill the sport it will make it awesome. I'll be doing routine 300km flights in the Cherokee and occasionally 500km closed course.

On Wednesday, January 21, 2015 at 12:09:05 PM UTC-6, wrote:

When I first came into this sport there was discussion of a device called THEMI that was supposed to tell us which way to turn in order to core a thermal. Some 35 years later I don't hear anything at all about that technology.

I used a Themi for about 10 years and it was a nice little thermalling aid (and a pretty good IGC logger). All it did was keep track of where the lift was and suggested which way to move your circle to center the thermal better. The only display was a couple of blinking lights that you could catch out of the corner of your eye, so no time was wasted looking at a display in the cockpit - which is what is going on now with all the thermal centering displays included in Winpilot, SeeYouMobile, etc.

My themi finally stopped getting a GPS lock (same problem as the VL?) and since I was getting to the point that I was out-guessing it most of the time, I took it out.

Kirk
66