Wk9 Fall 2020

Filler Photo I took of KIND 3nm away at 8,000ft from a P2006T flight

 Introduction

This week flight crew 1 participated in another round of mock search and rescue flights for William Weldon, made plans for maintenance operations, and reorganized our lab area.

Special Event 

This week we had the privilege of helping update our programs media material. The highlights included a new fleet photo of our two C-Astral Bramors, an M600 Pro, a M210, and a Mavic 2 Pro. Each of these have a special place in our curriculum, with an appropriate mission set when they are not being used in the classroom. A strong representation of the diversity that our program brings was captured with action shots from the day. Lastly our professor, graduate students and some undergrads where interviewed for their experiences. We talked about the applications of unmanned aerial systems, where our graduates go and describing the things our students do in the program. This event was long needed and very important to appropriately represent what we do.

Tuesday 9/20 Flights

Flight crew 1 assisted once again in William Weldon’s research flights at the Purdue Wildlife Area (PWA). As always, Weldon acted as the search coordinator for the experiment while John and Kaleb were on the recovery team, and Jeff was on the search team using the Loc8 software. This week Weldon chose to use only the Loc8 software for the search forgoing the normal setup of using 2 search teams. The operations proceeded smoothly, with the only event of note being that the Loc8 software failed to locate the simulated missing person one the third flight after 2 scans; this was the first time sense crew 1 has been assigned to this mission that loc8 failed to find its target and that flight was subsequently aborted.

Friday 9/23 Flight

Flight canceled due to inclement weather conditions. Instead of flying crew 1 decided to use the time we had dedicated to the flight to partially reorganize our lab area. Flight crew 1 organized Maintenance folders and unpacked and labeled new M600 batteries. Additionally, the senor mounting on the DJI M600 had failed. One of the screw mounting points on the sensor mounting rig had worn through, necessitating replacement. William and Kaleb took on the task of 3D printing a new mounting rig and John set aside time to perform the repair at a later date when the replacement part was available. A maintenance entry for the parts replacement will be dine in accordance with 14 CFR part 107 upon completion of the repair.