George Thorneycroft: Unmanned Air Systems with OSU Week #4

Even with our fourth week here wrapping up it feels like we started only yesterday. This was our last week in Stillwater. Early on Friday morning the USRI team, Simon, and I packed up a trailer and left for Alamosa Colorado, where we would be carrying out tests for the CLOUDMAP project.

The week was completely comprised of tasks concerning our preparedness for Alamos. Our First priority was setting up a set of small 5ft weather towers. These towers would be placed at all of the sites in Alamosa to gather stats about the weather on the ground. The towers are equipt with Pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors as well as a wind vane and anemometer for wind speed and direction. We began the week by finding the towers and constructing them. We later had to fix some of the programming on the computers in the towers and get them wired properly. Because someone had lost an important component to the towers, we weren’t able to get them running until we were already in Alamosa yesterday.

When we got to Alamosa on Friday afternoon we were greeted by a party held for the ClOUDMAP participants where I was introduced to many scientists contributing to the initiative. The next morning we left the hotel at 7:00 and headed down to a local airfield for a large convention in which each university displayed their gear to the public. this was followed by a series of flight tests done to calibrate the vehicles’ sensors.

Unfortunately, one of the remote pilots from USRI forgot to reprogram his autopilot to account for the 7,000ft altitude gain from Stillwater to Alamosa. On the final calibration flight the pilot, flying a huge 6ft fixed-wing aircraft, the autopilot made too sharp of a turn causing the aircraft to tip-stall and plummet to the ground. The aircraft was completely wrecked.

However, the crash did not stop us from going out today to collect data at certain sites around Alamosa. We spent all day flying multi-rotors up to 600 meters and back to get profiles of the temperature and humidity. I am excited to continue to help the team collect data at these sites for the next week.