The Liberty Gazette
October 5, 2021
Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely
Linda: Welcome back, Autumn! You’re my favorite season. Great weather means loads of fly-ins, many with extra fun activities. A favorite flying game is to drop something from overhead, and the closest drop to the bullseye wins. One the best games is a ‘punkin-chunkin’ contest. I thought our Canadian friend Tom Martin was creative when he impaled a pumpkin on a knife and rigged it up to one wing of his airplane, with a trigger to let it go just above the port-a-potty target. Ingenious, but he didn’t win. Vietnam veteran Army paratrooper Bobby Bennet won. Go figure.
Then just the other day I came across a video not to be missed. This time last year, the FliteTest team of Josh, Stefan, and Rob, had the wild idea to see if they could make a pumpkin fly. Stefan was tasked with finding a small pumpkin, under five pounds, around which airplane designer-builders Josh and Rob would build a drone. Unfortunately, Stefan returned with three large pumpkins because he couldn’t find any small ones. They weighed each one to the background of Stefan’s contagious, wide-mouthed laugh. The final pumpkin registered 20.4 pounds, which presented the ultimate challenge.
Josh tasked Rob, the team’s “solution architect,” with reducing the weight by half and carving a jack-o-lantern face with a smile as big as Stefan’s. The idea nearly brought Stefan to his knees with laughter.
Rob used a Snapchat pumpkin filter, took a picture of Stefan’s wildly smiling face, which brought the facial model to his knees in laughter again.
Josh figured it would take four heavy-lift drone motors, each which can carry up to four pounds, for twenty pounds of thrust. The airframe, he estimated, would be five pounds. Rob would have to carve out as much of the guts as possible, yet not too much, to make the pumpkin strong, yet light.
Meanwhile, Josh and Rob chose the perfect aircraft design: a B-24 Liberator. The laughing Stefan-faced pumpkin would replace the cockpit on their model. They built wing spars with foam, boxed in by strips of plywood and Poplar for strength, which joined a larger spar that went through the middle of the orange cockpit such that it would support the entire structure. Since every main component had to fasten to the structure inside the pumpkin, it was the fruit that became the airplane. They couldn’t take more than two days to complete this, as the carved cockpit was already getting squishy. Explaining the build, Josh was quick to say that viewers can take what they learned and apply it to building model aircraft.
The seasonal black and orange paint job and the flashing LED lights inside the jack-o-lantern added pizzazz without much weight. Equipped with the latest Insta360 camera, FliteTest’s flying pumpkin took off, flew and landed successfully. The flight view was beautifully complemented by Ohio’s autumn trees at their Edgewater Airpark home. It’s a must-see on YouTube. Click, watch, and laugh along.
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| Flite Test's Flying Pumpkin |
ElyAirLines.blogspot.com
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