Video of the Day #2 - Magpie Attack!

This one intrigued me so much I had to post it tonight. Two Magpie birds attack a hang glider in flight!

Video of the Day - Going down with the ship?

Video of the Day - And you thought Trikes used very little runway...

Find more videos like this on Trikepilot - Social Edition

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Trikepilot Social is Featured at Snap.com!

We were recently featured at Snap.com for our use of their product on our site. A nice post of a letter I sent to them. Check it out HERE

 

The "ultimate" Black Friday (shopping day) Purchase

Once again, hats off to my good friend Mick Balaban for an amazing find. Check out this ONE OF A KIND purchase for that "special someone" on Black Friday! Anyone got $80,000 you can lend me? LINK

New Widget to use on your Member Page

This one is called "Box" and can be found at www.box.net. It is a free upload and storage and sharing tool. It will allow you a quick, neat, and free way to upload and share "stuff" with anyone, create an RSS feed of that stuff, fax it for free, edit it, manipulate it, and generally do "anything" with it. The best part is that the "stuff" is all accessible through any place you put the widget. Thus, you can create a widget that you place in your trikepilot social page to share any types of files with anyone. This would be perfect to use for misc. things like checklists, pages from a manufacturer's manual, FAA documents, or whatever. Check out my sample BOX widget here:

Ahhhhh.... that "New Trike" smell... !!!

Juan Amestoy is the proud father of a brand spanking new Quik GT450, and he posted some awesome shots from the delivery room at the hospital in Thailand where the baby was born. I think he had twins because there is an identical Quik 912 right next to his GT450.... same father? Drunken night on the town?.. Either way, you can tell by the ear to ear grin that Juan is "seriously" pleased with his new machine. Check it out:




Kinda takes me back to March of 2006 when I adopted the first Quik baby to be brought over to America from England. I hired a Nanny friend named Paul Bass from Aerialadventures.net to help me with the birth. See my home movies here:

Aviatec Carbone

An interesting machine from France. Anyone flown one yet?

Equipment

• Ignition key with 2 magneto check
• Instruments switches
• Strobe light
• Battery charging light
• 12v plug
• Three on main wheels
• Digital Instrument Panel ALPHAMFD von Bräuniger
  
• Electric Fuel gauge and Visual gauge
• Compass
• Rescue Parachute
• Emergency engine stop
• Integrated fuel Tank 55 litre
• Travel Bags (Option)

Technical Specification

• Weight
• Max. Take Off weight 450 kg
• Empty weight 224 kg with Instruments - without Rescue
  system
• Max. Useful Load 226/213 kg.

• Performances (at max. Take Off
  Weight 450 kg)
• Max. Speed 135 km
• Vs0 61 km
• Min. Speed 65 km
• VNE 150 km
• Cruising Speed 80 – 120 km/h

More information, visit their website HERE

Some Seriously Cool Helmet Ideas!

From Icaro 2000, a hang-gliding specialty manufacturer are these full and partial shield helmets that might be "just the ticket" for those of us looking for an unusual and comfortable alternative to traditional Trike Buckets. Browse the site and get some ideas HERE

Video of the Day - Tustumena Glacier Trike Flight

Website of the Day - FlyingVideo!

Came across this little gem today. FlyingVideo, a UK based site that hosts a variety of flying videos, mostly trikes and microlights in the UK. They don't yet have a ton of videos, but what they have are pretty cool, and mostly by British pilots flying Quiks and GT450's, which is always nice ;)

Only downside is that they don't allow embedding of the videos, just links to their home page, which is a bit "old fashioned" in 2007, especially since many of their videos are "swiped" off other sites, including my pal Paul Bass' AerialAdventures.net ... what's the reason "not" to allow the videos to be viewed elsewhere as long as they have watermarks to the site?

Worth a quick peek!

Skybright Strobe Installation Detailed Instructions

Find more photos like this on Trikepilot - Social Edition
Check out photos showing complete installation. For written instructions, click on image and see details of each step.

New Features for Site:

Hi Gang. Hope you're having brilliant flying weather this weekend like we are in the Midwest of America. It's about 52F (around 14C I think) with bright blue skies..

I've been thinking about adding some new features to the site to make things more interesting. I would like your feedback regarding the same.

1. A "Review" Section of the more popular trike brands and features. Rather than it coming from me, I'd like the owners of each brand to come forward and talk about what they like/dislike about their machines, or machines they've owned in the past. We have a lot of new buyers and shoppers out there, especially with LSA coming to its conclusion by January.
   For example: Here is a really great picture by Paul Hill of his Tanarg parked on the ground with the wing on. I had NO IDEA that the Tanarg had such a COOL feature where the entire mast and fiberglass covers tilt forward in one piece...Awesome! I'd love to know more from Paul Hill or Bob Thompson or Wayne Bezner Kerr about how they like this feature or others on the Tanarg.
   

   

   
   
2. A "New Gear" Section where all the latest accessories are rated and reviewed... by the members. For example, the video camcorders, the headsets, intercoms, etc. Right now the reviews are all coming from me for the most part, but I would like to get a better degree of input from everyone. By indexing these pages, we can create a great resource for future shopping.
   


3. A "Marketplace" Section. This would be for buying, selling, trading, swapping, etc. Since everyone already has a place on their page to put up pictures, videos, information, etc., about their "stuff", the section would be a simple Index of all entries by the members of things they want to put out for consideration. I think this can be easily done with a little "tag" that I can offer to everyone that they put on any entry to their private page postings which would say "marketplace" and this would then allow the site to find and index these entries and put the links all on one page, with pictures, sort of like Barnstormers does now... but for free.

I'm open to any other new ideas or suggestions as well, so please SEND THEM TO ME so we can put them into action!

Another cool camera / camcorder idea for Trike use!

Thanks to Mick Balaban for bringing this cool little video / still camera system to my attention. It is called the Digital Hero 3 and it provides a 3mp still camera along with a 640x480 resolution video recording capability, all on an SD memory Card. Has a velcro wrist band mount and a waterproof polycarbonate enclosure. Price looks pretty great at only $139.99!!

I will try to get my hands on a unit for testing, but check out their website HERE or HERE
They also have a neat Social Network (kinda like ours!) where users of the product can post videos taken with the system. Lots of sports represented there, but so far no Trike Flying!

New Multi-Camera Solid-State Video System coming for Review!

I just got off the phone with Nick O'Kelly, the inventor of the "ReFlight" recording/camera system. His company will be sending me out a system for review next week and I will share the details with all of you here.

What intrigues me about this system is the price point and the removable flash memory card. The quality of the videos is about "average" for what we all expect from a bullet camera head, rather than HD quality... but, it seems the convenience of the entire package being permanently mounted in the trike with a removable memory would make it VERY easy to record each and every flight.

I will await the delivery of the product to say more, but for now, they have details at their Website and we will be featuring their product in our new marketplace section of Trikepilot Social. This will be a place on the site where vendors can market their products directly to our readers, while allowing direct interaction and feedback on the use, installation, and improvements of the product.

Obviously, we hope that anyone who might purchase the product would share their videos on the site as well ;)

I look forward to sharing more next week!

New Hand Shields ... Prototype Ver. 1 ?

From my pal, Steve Tweedt, an engineer by trade... comes this cool design for hand shields that wills surely get you faster service at the gas pump on the flight line! "Give me 10 gallons and make it snappy!!! GRRRRRRRRR!!"

It's official! Our New Logo is in place...

I combined the two ideas, and voila! I'm happy. It also is now a transparent background .png file so that any of you with custom member pages no longer have that ugly black background bar to ruin your webpages!

Man thanks again to Mick Balaban for sending me the logo to tweak!!

Hope you like ;)
spence

New idea I'm developing for Hand Shield ... comments?

Winter flying is just around the corner. I like to fly year-round, and have various "goodies" in my bag of tricks that allow me to fly in cold weather. Heavy coat, insulated pants and bib, heavy boots, heating coils for my body parts, full mask, balaclava, etc. The one piece of
equipment with which I'm not satisfied is the classic "bar mitt".

Perhaps I'm unusual in my preference, but I can't seem to figure out a good way to use the existing bar mitts. It seems that I'm always having trouble with them because I fidget a lot. I don't like to keep my hands nailed down to the bars or in one spot for very long. Since the bar
mitts I have from Airplane Gear are very "tight" to get into, the situation is even harder.

This has gotten me thinking. I love to tinker with designing new "concepts" and modifications...so why not a new twist on the OLD idea of bar mitts?

Rather than making the mitts attached to the bar...why not simply make hand/wrist deflectors that stay attached to the user's arms, yet provide the same wind deflection? Plus, these would give two surfaces to use for writing notes (airport info, radio frequencies, etc.) and
holding sliced-up chart sections.

I'm building a prototype now, but basically, think of a flat piece of polycarbonate (plastic) that is lays across the wrists and fingers and up to the forearm. It would be curled over the finger tips like the letter "J" with the fingers going into the curl when wrapped around the control bar. It would then have a "C" shaped curl facing down on to the forearm at the other end. There would be two straps, one would be a semi-permanent attachment strap at the forearm, so the device would not fly off in mid-air. The other would be a "loop" of velcro or similar (perhaps a soft but strong bungee material) that would fall into the nook of the first knuckle of every finger, so it could be squeezed against the control bar without interfering.

The idea is that one could wear whatever warm gloves they choose, or even thin gloves, but still be able to have full motion of their fingers and use of their hands on and off the bar. The plastic shield would deflect the brunt of all wind when the hands were on the bar. Also, the deflectors could hold a heated coils or similar to provide additional warmth to the backside of the hand/glove, in addition to providing those extra handy surfaces for notes and charts.

I will take pictures and make notes as my project progresses, but I'd like to hear from you guys as well. Any thoughts or ideas or preferences? What do you use for hand warmth in the winter and how well does it work?

Skybright Strobe Installation Update

Find more photos like this on Trikepilot - Social Edition


I spent the last couple days working on the Skybright Strobe installation on my Quik. I'm preparing a full installation "how to", but in the meantime, I've got some more preview shots of the installation.

The project has gone pretty smooth so far, the only hitch has been taking my time in figuring out how to make the custom landing gear leg mounts, the wiring harnesses, and the new switch array for the dash. When completed, I will have a landing gear light, quad strobes with variable pattern, and position lights on the wing tips, all controlled by their own switches. I've put the strobes and position lights on their own 10A circuit branch.

All of the hardware for my mounting design is off the shelf from Lowes Building Supply and requires only simple hand tools to customize.

I look forward to sharing the complete "how to" as soon as the installation is completed!