NASA's 10-engine electric UAV
Well done, Greased Lightning!
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/01/nasas-10-engine-electric-uav-now-flies-as-well-as-it-hovers/?ncid=rss_truncated
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/01/nasas-10-engine-electric-uav-now-flies-as-well-as-it-hovers/?ncid=rss_truncated
Comments
Having vertical lift in the tail actually makes a lot of good sense --- easier to stabilize transistions. The video is excellent and informative. All that orange yarn visually indicates when the wings transistion from turbulent to laminar air flow and begin to provide lift.
With the wingspan, they can stick a couple of solar panels on there.
If you were an observer at a military base about two hours away from NASA's research center at Langley, Va., recently, those are questions that would easily have come to mind. That's where a team of NASA researchers launched a test flight of Greased Lightning (or less sexily, GL-10), an electrically powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that has eight propellers along its 10-foot (3-meter) wingspan and another two on its tail