Hey it's me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So last week I
described collective pitch control for a helicopter, I described cyclic pitch
control for a helicoper, and I also described anti-torque pitch contol
But this week we're going to combine them all and describe something called collective-cyclic pitch mixing.
It's pretty cool, and it's basically how every helicopter pilot flies,
including Carl in this case. The way I'm gonna describe this to you is by setting up
and showing you a high speed video clip of Carl flipping the helicopter over and flying inverted.
[rotor noise] You're about centre of the frame, maybe a little less right there.
[rotor noise]
[rotor noise] That's gonna be good.
It's pretty interesting, because if you think about it he's having
to use both collective and cyclic to make the sweep, go up, and then he's
going back to negative collective.
[music]
And then he's balancing
it up there with cyclic all the time. So you can see he's never using
one particular input. It's always a variation of both. OK so if you
didn't really understand what was going on there, I asked Carl to do something else for us.
I asked him to mount a camera on the back of his helicopter looking at the swashplate, and then
take a normal flight so you could see the collective-cyclic mixing, but here's a couple of things to
keep in mind. At the top of the screen you're going to see the rotors, and at some point it's gonna look like
the rotors are bending. That's actually not happening. What you're seeing there is
something called the rolling shutter effect. The second thing you're gonna see it looks like the
rotor shaft is speeding up and slowing down wildly. That has to do with the frame rate of the camera.
That's called aliasing. If you want to know what aliasing is, just click this box over
here and I'll explain that to you in greater detail.
[electronic servo sounds]
[music]
OK I've been getting a lot of comments on these videos about whether or not an actual
helicopter can do these types of manouvres. And the answer is yes, and no.
Helicopters can do this if they're designed for it, however you're limited by
the meat servo sitting in the seat. A human can only take so much accelleration.
So how do you scale up what you're seeing on this RC helicopter to a real
helicopter? Before they flew a space shuttle into space they had to do a wind tunnel test
on it somehow right? Well it gets complicated but there's a term called similitude
and similitude has to do with the geometric
kinematic and the dynamic similarity between a small scale object and a
full scale object. Engineers do this all the time, especially aerospace engineers.
So anyway, go look at the wiki link I'm gonna put below and read up on similitude
so you can understand it. I will tell you this. It has something to do with continuum mechanics
which is by far the hardest course I've ever taken in my life. So if you must know
there's a city in Florida named Destin, and the thrift store there is the coolest place
on earth for me personally. Anyway next week's video will blow your mind.
It's really complicated but it's really interesting, so
if you can understand it you're doing pretty good, but it blew my mind.
It's gonna blow yours too. Have a good one, and get Smarter Every Day.
[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ]
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.