Latest news June 10, 2006 OSTIV Lectures - day 2 The second day´s lectures began with the presentation “Wind Measurement System Using Miniaturized Navigation Sensors for Light Aircraft and Sailplanes” by Stephan Myschik and Gottfried Sachs, which was presented by Orlando da Costa. Orlando described a system by which the unboard INS and GPS systems are used to determine the actual wind speed and direction, as well as the angle of attack and sideslip of the aircraft. Validation using an instrumented aircraft found the agreement between the acual (measured) flight results and those determined using the onboard navigation equipment to be excellent. The availability of this information will improve the “situational awareness” of the pilot and, thereby, improve flight safety.
Orlando then presented a second paper titled “Dynamic Soaring in Shear Wind Regions Associated with Jet Streams” written by Godfried Sachs and Orlando da Costa. This interesting presentation considered exploiting the wind shear in the jet stream for dynamic soaring. Eta was used in simulations of this situation, and the minimum conditions required for succes were well below those generally available. While the required maneuvering is quite aggressive and additional work is necessary, it was concluded that dynamic soaring in the jetstream seems entirely possible.
The presentations continued after he break with the paper “Optimization Criteria and Sailplane Airfoil Design” by Lukas Popelka and Milan Matejka, presented by Lukas. This presentation dealt with the requirements for airfoil performance as prioritized by pilots in the Czech Republic. In particular, these pilots were predominantly flying club type sailplanes, and weighed handling qualities and low-speed performance as more important than maximum cross-country speed. Several new airfoils were designed to satisfy these requirements and wind-tunnel tests helped to demonstrate that the design requirements for club and training sailplanes has been realized.
Next Mathieu Scherrer presented his paper “The ‘’Flight Template’’: a Tool for the Optimization of Sailplane Aerodynamic for Cross Country Flight at Preliminary Design Stage.” This was a very intesting paper in which pilot flight logs were used to determine the percentage of time that a pilot spends at each lift coefficient. The optimization method is then able to guide a designer by minimizing the power required to operate at every flight condition. This tool has the potential of offering a great deal of insight to future sailplane designers.
Herbert Pirker then presented his paper ”About the Instant Cross-Country Speed.” Currently our flight computers rarely give average cross-country speeds based on times of less than 0.5 hours. The purpose of this paper was to define an instantaneous cross-country speed. Herbert provided an excellent explanation of why using Nickel/MacCready speed-to-fly theory can not provide the instantaneous result, and then described a new formulation which does. This paper should be of interest to all cross-country and competition pilots.
The next paper was another one presented by Orlando da Costa: “Cost-Effective Flight Simulator Approach for Ultralight Aircraft, Motorgliders and Sailplanes” authored by Florian Holzapfel and Godfried Sachs. In this work a very cost-effective method of providing visualization for flight simulators was presented. The possibilities for applying this system to sailplane training were discussed.
In the Open Session in the evening, for everbody interested to attend, Ronald Blume presented his lecture "The Rescue System, the Last Chance" about the glider recovery system developed by H.-J. Streifeneder. The development of this life-saving rescue system took about ten years and was certified last year and awarded with the OSTIV-Prize 2005.
Next lecture titled "You Fly Them, We Crash Them" was presented by Dr. Tony Segal. Tony, assisted by his lovely wife Lizz, gave an overview of his 20 years of work on crashworthiness of glider cockpits and survivable loads on the pilot, a lecture full of very valuable information. He received the FAI Alvaro de Orleans Bourbon Award for this important work on the improvement of safety in gliding.
