Thor Flight 75

Date: 10/10/2012 Location: ACRC Aircraft: Thor, GPS FASER Pilot: Arion Mangio Flights: 4 Thor, 3 GPS FASER Weather Partly cloudy with winds up to 14 mph towards the afternoon. METAR (Anoka County) KANE 101345Z 26006KT 12SM SKC 02/M02 A3007 KANE 101645Z 26012G16KT 12SM SCT045 BKN250 08/M03 A3008 Adhika, Andrei, Arion, Brian, and Will arrived at ACRC around 9:00am to test the revised waypoint guidance algorithm, and to obtain flight data from GPS FASER for Adhika's research. For Thor, a 70x70m and 150x150m square pattern was flown with both the original waypoint guidance algorithm, and the newly revised algorithm. GPS FASER was flown once in manual mode to verify the navigation filter solution and GPS sensor measurements. Once verified, the revised waypoint algorithm was flown with GPS FASER in a 150x150m square, and again in a 600x250m rectangular pattern with limited bank angle and a slower airspeed. All flight ops ran smoothly. Thor flight 75 was conducted using the revised waypoint guidance algorithm (waypoint_guidance_fast). This revision uses the logic that if the next waypoint is too close to the aircrafts current position, the aircraft turns in the opposite direction of the next waypoint until it can be reached by turning in the correct direction. Since the 150x150m square is large enough that the aircraft will not need to enter this reachability maneuver, the actual flight pattern is nearly identical to Thor flight 73