DIY Ekranoplan Takes Flight: Coolest Water Toy Ever?

this video is brought to you by squarespace i'll talk to you more about squarespace later in the video for the first time ever i'm flying on a design of my own that is big enough to carry a human i have designed and flown many drones over the years as well as having done a fair bit of manned flight but i've never mixed the two by designing and flying my own manned vehicle i decided to start here with this boattoe dakranoplan or ground effect vehicle it seemed like the best way to get my feet wet in full scale design while still being able to safely use inexpensive materials for a moment there i actually thought a boat toto crana plan was an original idea but the internet showed me i was wrong as usual for those of you who have been patiently wading through the build videos i finally got this thing on the water and had some fun it didn't always go perfectly but it definitely works [Music] right off i would like to apologize to my brothers back in the day i grew up water skiing on this very lake and when it was their turn to ski i would sometimes forget to hold up the safety flag when they crashed because i was daydreaming about flying on something like this behind our boat rather than paying attention to what was happening in front of me sorry guys thought you should know anyhow if you are new to this channel you may not be familiar with how ground effect vehicles work and you'll definitely want to know what is happening so that this makes sense ground effect vehicles fly close to the surface much of the time they use wings to create lift just like any airplane would but unlike normal aircraft they are designed to maximize the additional lift a wing experiences as it compresses the air between the bottom of the wing and the ground even though your normal airplane isn't designed to spend most of its time in this narrow region that is typically half the wingspan or less of the aircraft if you've ever been on an airliner you have experienced this phenomenon yourself next time you fly somewhere just notice how as you come into land right when the aircraft is about to touch down it seems to stop descending and just float above the runway at that moment the aircraft is experiencing a very big increase in lift that the plane just sort of has to ride on as it continues to slow down the really cool part is that even though the airplane is getting a lot more lift than usual the drag is actually decreasing it is a very efficient way to fly and now you know why i wanted to build this vehicle as inexpensively as possible while also giving it a real chance of being successful so it was a mix of materials for my local home improvement store and aircraft grade wood and fiberglass before i started constructing the real one i verified the design with a small subscale model bob the monkey stood in as the test pilot it's your best one yet bob over the course of two months this was designed and built and if you'd like to know more there are a few videos on this channel detailing the build but you came here to see this thing fly not me i'm looking for something to die day i was able to coordinate with a really great crew and a ski boat which was important to have because of their low end power speed and small wakes i cannot thank them enough for their time and skill this was critical for everything to work out without anybody getting hurt i think that was his best run right there we've maintained it the main safety feature that made all this possible besides personal protective equipment was a rope release all right guys so here's how a rope release works we're going to imagine this broom handle is the ski pool so you just take the rope that is attached to the actual ground effect vehicle you put it on this short section of rope here and then you can just run this around the ski pole a few times and the operator holds on to this segment right here so if anything happens the operator lets go of this segment and the ski rope just pulls out and releases if you haven't visited this channel before you would be unaware that i have plans to take over the world with autonomous ground effect vehicles you are no doubt aware that taking over the world requires a lot of planning and work a highly underrated part of the modern world domination game is a great website with all the work i have to do i just don't have time to build a website from the ground up and hiring somebody to make a website is not inexpensive i'd rather spend my money on flight controllers for my robotic army that is where squarespace comes in with their easy to use templates and intuitive editing tools even a complete novice can build a great website to get their message out to the world create an online website to sell their products use the included video studio to post original content you name it you can also set up your domain through squarespace squarespace has the easiest and the best tools for setting up a website no matter what your goals are head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use this url on the screen or the link in the description to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and now back to the video how this thing would hold up and behave was somewhat unknown and an incremental approach to flight was used to ease into actually flying what we did was increase the toe speed 5 miles per hour every toe starting at 5 miles per hour after each toe we stopped to see if there had been any problems and discussed the next toe so i just needed to lean forward more no i wouldn't have come up like that if i had been leaning forward so that's perfect also conley who was manning the rope release was letting the rope go if he ever saw more than two feet of air between the lowest point on the front wing and the water this approach ended up working well after assembling the vehicle on the beach it was towed out to the lake where the testing began as described one problem we ran into was that the ski rope was too short and my front wing was running into the boat wake fortunately there was an extra rope on board so we doubled the length and didn't experience any more issues with that the next problem i ran into that still needs to be resolved was the distance i needed to shift my weight forward and rearward depending on the height of the vehicle above the water a phenomenon that is unique to flying in ground effect is that the vehicle center of pressure shifts depending on the height of the vehicle off the surface when a vehicle is flying near the surface the center of pressure is further back and when the vehicle rises the center of pressure moves forward since most vehicle center of gravity does not shift what is stable low to the surface wants to nose up and flip on its back as it rises this vehicle has no movable surfaces and i am counting on weight shift alone to move the center of gravity as the center of pressure moves to get the vehicle more than a few inches off the water i had to get my weight back as far as possible and the instant it popped i had to move forward more than the handle would allow if i didn't time my weight shift properly so i need to make some changes to the handle area to enable sustained flight more than a foot or so off the surface but roll control seemed fine dude that was so much fun i cannot tell you how satisfying it is to successfully fly your very own creation for the first time anyhow for your enjoyment let me show you the best run of the first day in its entirety from start to finish [Music] so so on that last landing too much of my weight went forward into the handle and i ended up cracking the base of the handle we tried one more run but i could hear that there was a problem [Music] so we called it a day and towed it back to the dock to see what was wrong getting a great crew in tow boat turned out to be harder than i anticipated given where i live but i could not be more ecstatic with how things turned out i will not be able to use that boat again in the very near future but if someone in the southern california area would like to step up let me know the future of this project is in the hands of the community the modifications to allow for greater weight shift have been started and i hope there is one more video left in this machine to really get the most out of this project before we move on if you feel more people should see this video hit that like button for the algorithm to send it far and wide have a great day fellow human

Channel: Think Flight

Views: 214,069

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Id: bjytik55smo

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022