Amateurs Win ARCAA UAV Competition Flying 30-Year-Old R/C Kit

Sun, 26 Oct '08

"Team Telemaster" Bests Engineering Students' Entries
Aaron Donaldson and Simeon O'Neill entered and won the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation 2008 UAV Outback Rescue Challenge in Queensland, Australia last month with a Hobby-Lobby Senior Telemaster kit purchased over 30 years ago by Aaron's dad.



Converted from gas- to electric-power, Team Telemaster's plane featured a fully articulating belly-mounted camera. Their ground-based control displayed airspeed, altimeter, artificial horizon, the plane's GPS coordinates, and included an autopilot system and a video screen.

The two other entrants, both university-sponsored teams spending four times as much on their projects as Team Telemaster, crashed their planes. "Everyone [else] was aerospace engineers," Donaldson said. "Simeon and I didn't finish more than a semester of engineering."

The 2008 UAV Challenge, a direct outcome of "The Future of UAVs -- Challenges and Applications in the Asia Pacific Region" workshop ARCAA conducted in 2005, was held from September 23 to 25, 2008 at Kingaroy airport in Queensland, Australia. Kingaroy is the site for a new UAV test and training center being used by Boeing Australia and ARCAA.

The goal of the Outback Rescue competition was to rescue "Outback Joe," who is lost in the Australian outback and desperately in need of assistance. "A total time of one hour is allowed for the mission. This includes all time for set up, launch, mission, landing and recovery," ARCAA rules stated.

"Your system must be capable of searching an area of at least 2nm x 2nm, up to 5nm from the aerodrome. The target for your search will be a human (or dummy) wearing light khaki clothes and an Akubra hat. The target will not be moving and will be positioned in a typical resting pose in a rural setting.

"The GPS coordinates representing the four corners of the search area will be provided in the days leading up to the competition. The air vehicle must not travel outside of the search area or transit lane, for its flight will be terminated if it does so. The search area will be not more that 5nm from the aerodrome.

"Over a 60 minute period, teams must deploy their air vehicle systems and conduct the search. Once the search has been conducted a decision must be made as to where Outback Joe is located. A GPS coordinate, representing Outback Joe's location, must be provided to the judges.

"Once Joe has been located with the judges' approval, the air vehicle must be tasked with delivering its emergency package. The emergency package will contain 500ml of 'life saving' water. The package must be dropped as closely as possible to Outback Joe, without landing on him. The UAV will then return to the Kingaroy airport for recovery."

Though they failed to complete the challenge after a loose wiring plug forced them to land, Team Telemaster still walked off with top honors and a $5,000 AU prize.

"The entire team at Hobby-Lobby is thrilled to see our classic Telemaster take on the big guys and win," said Hobby-Lobby President Jay Graves. "The Telemaster has been a consistently great plane for R/C pilots looking for easy flying characteristics combined with a simple assembly process."

Hobby-Lobby International is a 43-year-old, Tennessee-based company manufacturing R/C airplanes, helicopters and boats. The high-wing Telemaster comes in a variety of sizes from micro to a version with a 12-foot wingspan. Assembly options include kits, which are built piece by piece, or "Almost Ready to Fly" (ARF) planes that only require the addition of an engine and electronics.

Cebu Pacific Buys Aircraft

Philippines-based airline Cebu Pacific has taken delivery of its third new ATR 72-500 turbo-prop aircraft from Toulouse, France.

The aircraft will be based in the airline's Cebu hub in the Philippines to support further expansion. Cebu Pacific has ordered up to 18 new ATR aircraft as part of its overall domestic operations expansion.

Cebu Pacific has the youngest fleet of aircraft in the Philippines with 10 A319, eight A320 and three ATR72-500 aircraft.

U.S. to aid C-130 search

A US Navy vessel was steaming to the southern Philippines Friday to help locate the wreckage of a Filipino military transport plane that crashed at sea, the Asian country's air force chief said.

The oceanographic survey ship USNS John McDonnell is set to arrive in the Davao Gulf on Saturday, five days after the C-130 went down killing all nine people on board, said Lt. Gen. Pedrito Cadungog.

"The survey ship should arrive in the area tomorrow afternoon," Cadungog said. "It would help us locate the position of the plane."

He said the government needed to recover major parts of the wreckage, which lies in deep water, to determine the cause of the crash.

"We are no longer looking for survivors," he added.

The 41 year-old US-made aircraft lost contact with air traffic controllers shortly after taking off from Davao airport on restive Mindanao island late Monday.

The Philippine military has ruled out its own earlier suggestion that it could have been shot down by Muslim insurgents.

Meanwhile, a civilian training plane crashed at sea off the island of Lubang south of Manila on Thursday, killing its pilot, Cadungog said.

The cause of this second accident, involving a Piper PA-38 aircraft, is under investigation by civil aviation authorities, he added.

Civil Aviation News

MANILA, Philippines — A pending bill in the House of Representatives seeks to encourage air travel and tourism by further liberalizing commercial air travel.

House Bill 4314 proposes the alignment of existing rules and regulations governing domestic and international air and sea travel and tourism.

"The country has become the laggard today in Southeast Asia with only some three million tourist arrivals a year, while most of our neighboring countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore have achieved tens of millions of tourist arrivals. Even latecomers in the industry like Vietnam and Cambodia have overtaken the country already," said Zamboanga del Sur Rep. Antonio Cerilles, author of the bill, in a statement on the House of Representatives website (www.congress.gov.ph).

Cerilles said even if R.A. 9497 seeks to ensure efficiency and safety of commercial air travel operation, there remains a pressing need to address the "commercial and aero-political aspects" of the industry.

RA 9497, signed into law in March 2008, creates the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines.

In filing his bill, Cerilles said the Philippines was once the leading tourism country in the 1960s but has deteriorated in terms of growth and development in the travel and tourism industry.

He said the continuing clamor for liberalization of commercial aviation will sufficiently address not only the needs of tourists but also of millions of OFWs.

Also, he said no Filipino carrier operates in any part of the Middle East and Europe, including the Eastern Seaboard of the United States where many Filipino seamen fly to catch up with their ocean-going vessels in New York City and Miami.

"Most of the world-class tourism destinations of the country are located outside Metro Manila. We need to facilitate the travel of tourists from their point of origin to the final tourism destinations and thus there is a need to improve the tourist facilities in the major airports of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao," Cerilles said.

Cerilles added the move will result in the decongestion of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, which can no longer cope with the influx of tourist arrivals for lack of facilities, and which now also needs expansion since it is located in a highly urbanized and populated area. - GMANews.TV

Explosion Investigation

MANILA, Philippines--At the end of a mission to help investigate an explosion aboard a Qantas jet nine days ago, a Philippine aviation official experienced on Saturday a midair scare on a flight of the Australian carrier bound for Manila.

A top official of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) was among some 200 passengers who found themselves on a jittery ride over Australia, when the Qantas jet made an emergency landing in Sydney because of a hydraulic leak.

Keen on any sign of aircraft trouble, CAAP Executive Director Daniel Dimagiba grew worried as he observed the slow ascent of the Qantas plane, a Boeing 767, just minutes after its delayed takeoff at the Sydney airport at around 2 p.m. Saturday.

"I was in business class and on a window seat—that's my favorite seat on a plane—and I noticed as we took off that the plane's rate of climb was slow. I could see the ground slowly drifting away and the sound of the jet engine was different," Dimagiba told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net)on Saturday.

He was flying home after he met with Qantas officials and observed the Canberra-based Australian Transport Safety Bureau's data retrieval and analysis of the flight data recorder from the Qantas Boeing 747-400 jet, which was involved in a midair decompression within Philippine air space on July 25.

The flight en route to Melbourne from Hong Kong made an emergency landing in Manila after a blast believed to have been caused by an exploding oxygen cylinder ripped a large hole in its fuselage.

Plane parts retrieved from the damaged jet, which is still grounded in Manila, were sent to Canberra for forensic analysis. The CAAP sent a representative to observe the probe in compliance with international aviation regulations.

Then on July 28, a Qantas 737-800 was forced to return to Adelaide after a landing gear door failed to retract.

The incidents followed a series of media reports in Australia about concerns about the quality of maintenance amid an increase in the amount of such work outsourced to other countries.

On his way back to the airport, Dimagiba never expected a first-hand taste of what he has been dealing with in his career. The official knew all too well that something was wrong.

"Since I understand how planes work, I was concerned because our ascent was slow … The other passengers were in their seats, just relaxing, reading," he said over the phone on Sunday.

Trouble began before passengers entered the plane, according to Dimagiba. He recalled hearing the airline ground crew saying that the plane's passenger door could not be shut properly.