The FAA is a high maintenance partner for regulations. Their methods are however quite effective. They are expensive, slow, excessive, innovation crushing, profit killing, cross purposed, narrow minded, ... You get my point.
I repeat-They are however effective. I have seen their safety regs and methods work and work well at achieving safety levels that I would not have imagined possible.

The FAA is tasked with both promoting and ensuring the safety of aviation. I believe that if there was a separate organization tasked with the promotion of aviation we would be much better off. Safety isn't just first, it is virtually the only consideration and thus aviation is a shadow of what it could be to mankind.

If the FAA has done such a poor job promoting aviation thus far I see no reason that we should expect an activity that is as far from mainstream aviation as AWE should expect good results working with them.

But then again the FAA is the only game in town.? I think we need to look to other government departments to take on the role of promotion. Perhaps the Department of Energy.

The only organization that seems to get expedient results from the FAA is the Department of Defense. We need an equivalent big player in our corner. Failing an appropriate federal partner then we could look to the States to provide us with true advocacy. Because we do not cross state lines a state government could grant the permissions needed to operate. This is however a contentious way to go about it.

What I would like to see is a way to adopt the successful aspects of the FAA's aviation safety culture. Like, for example the NTSB's crash reports and the best practices that follow them. And leave out the arduous certification procedures and paperwork that cause us to see so few new small aircraft designs.

Additionally I don't see a crash of an unmanned kite as being equivalent to a manned aircraft accident. I think all FAA regs and procedures assume life is at risk in any accident.
Side note. I think man-lifting should continue to be taboo for AWE. The safety requirements and resulting scrutiny seriously hampers return on investment.

Brian Turner

Oh OK Dave S.
I just wanted to make sure it wasn't an example of people being full-of-it, issuing empty statements that, when followed up on later, are forgotten for the next, new, equally untrue feel-good "story".
It's a symptom of liars that the lie must always keep changing so one can never pin it down.

Pay attention to that when someone tells you something, and when you go back and ask them about their esults, all the essential aspects of their story has changed, yet they want to act like its the same story as before. In reality, it's a new story with the old name. The biggest field for liars? Any statement that anyone says regarding what they themselves will do in the future - almost always a lie.

I've got this analogy of lies to lilly pads and liars to frogs: The frog (liar) can only stay on a lilly-pad (lie) for a short period (a few seconds) until the lilly-pad begins to sink (lie is revealed as "not true") whereupon the frog )(liar) must quickly jump to a new lilly-pad, just before the present lilly-pad goes underwater.

"Lilly pads of lies" I call them

All the "dozens of experiments" you say you will do: OK let's start counting now. Let us know when you get to "dozens". Uh-oh that lilly-pad is taking on water... getting lower - quick, jump! Maybe WOW has a million dollars for you. What happened to that happy-talk?

I also "plan" more than I can possibly do. It's only human. What's tragic to me is that the agencies that purport to want to fund and participate in all this, including both the official labs as well as the Googles etc. is that they are ALL talk and can be literally counted on to waste ALL their millions on absolutely nothing while ideas like ours that could truly lead somewhere are immediately buried in bureaucracy and paperwork. They are ALL lilly pads and ALL lies since there's no success required for them to get their next paycheck.

That's why it was a no-brainer to predict that NASA would do absolutely nothing with their 100 G's. I assume they are done now?

Show the bureaucrats an unassailable technological breakthrough and they will challenge you back with crafting a monumental amount of paperwork before they can even discuss it. Their own technical people won't be able to comment without a conflict of interest.

Their bureaucracy will ensure that, if you DO waste a few months running their gauntlet, hired technical reviewers, without true expertise in the field, will "analyze" your breakthrough without ever comprehending it - most likely too busy to even read it carefully, much less digest and understand it. Heck why should they care? They have a secure job, kids in college, etc. It's all about 1 more paycheck based on the illusion of work being performed.

God forbid these idiots could create a true well-funded laboratory, where people could build and test ideas all day every day as they imply in all that wonderful P.R., as you state you would like to do.

Who wouldn't? Create breakthroughs? How can ww have become so dumbed down that we are willing to accept a nonstop stream of lies and nothingness as a substitute for progress? There oughtta be a law!

I remember NREL trying to get me to present at their industry "growth" (stagnation?) forums: They'd ask for a huge amount of paperwork, as though all the patents were not already too much work, and then say my "business plan" wasn't good enough. So I'd say OK what more do I need to do to make you all happy? Well they hooked me up with some "interns" that could "help" me write a business plan. OK what does this "plan" (they are seldom followed) have to have? Well the first thing I needed, as it turns out, was "a slogan". See, a business plan needs a slogan, and if you don't have a slogan, how can you have a business plan? Hey I get it! This is Alice in Wonderland! Endless distractions, that, combined, insure you will never get to your "point".

OK reminds me of "me and my arrow" (Oblio?) you gotta have "a point". Well I HAD a point, just not a slogan. I guess it's always something...
Next time I land on a planet with an energy crisis, I'll be sure to handle the "slogan" aspect before being so foolish as to think any agency could participate in a breakthrough without the inventor also having "a slogan".

The slogan thing is just an example - give them the slogan, and next it will be something else - perhaps fictional financial statements. ANYTHING but just developing the breakthrough. ANYTHING but just building it and running it.

The main thing is they can never stick to their original "point". Give up on them: they HAVE no point. They are a false trail. The fork in the road has a sign that says "to progress go this way", but the people who put up the sign are mere signmakers, or worse, they HIRE signmakers, and do nothing themselves at all! They wouldn't know progress if it hit them over the head!

Oh and to bureaucrats: those useless, vestigial, multiple, sausage-like appendages at the end of your arms were once used for building things. :)
Doug Selsam

-- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, dave santos <santos137@...

Attachments :

Air tools are popular because air motors are light and compact, but it takes a 5 HP air compressor to do the job of a 1 HP electric motor on the tool.  The heat of compression makes it possible to run a CHP system at over 100% thermal efficiency, but only if the needs for heat and power are serendipitously balanced.  Usually, the heat of compression, made from high-grade electricity, is simply wasted.  

Doug Selsam might want to look at it and share if this idea can be incorporated into his turbine design.
I really want to see some improvement for low wind speeds.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/20379/page2/

Prototypes of wind-turbine blades (see image below) have shown that the delayed stall doubles the performance of the turbines at wind speeds of about 17 miles per hour and allows the turbine to capture more energy out of lower-speed winds. For example, the turbines generate the same amount of power at 10 miles per hour that conventional turbines generate at 17 miles per hour. The tubercles effectively channel the air flow across the blades and create swirling vortices that enhance lift.

The Experimental Aircraft Association is an excellent advocate for aviation. I don't think AWE is anywhere on their radar. Can AWE build a million plus member group to write their congressmen or in EAAs case BE their congressmen. I doubt it. I don't know how it is now, but in the '80s when I was a member of the EAA the FAA treated them as a sideshow. Getting the EAA on board with AWE would be cool. I don't think that I would call it likely but definatly cool.

I don't have anything bad to say about the Light Sport Aircraft rules. Except what took so long. I think the LSA would be a good starting example for AWE rules. Last I read them it was just a proposed rule. I wonder how well they are working for the aircraft designers.

Ultralights operate outside of the embrace of the FAA.

And neither of these nor experimental aircraft are allowed to operate commercially. So yes they will let you build toys as a hobby. You could generate electricity as long as you gave it away. Anything that would support a business plan has to be Type Certified.

There is an interesting exception. State and city governments are exempt from many of these rules and can use non-certified aircraft for their operations. This usually means military surplus. But a city owned utility could own and operate an airborne wind farm. I think you might even be able to sell them electricity from experimental "aircraft". Sorry I am getting lost in minutia.

Back in the 1990 I looked into type certifying a crop duster based on ultralight tech. Sure you can do it legally. You just can't do it practically. The added cost for each aircraft would have driven the cost up to the point that you would likely never recover it. And the cost is a mystery item as well. For example, at the time certified aircraft had to have a firewall. The burden of proving that a firewall is not needed falls on the manufacturer. That meant that we would have had to fund a scientific study of sufficient rigor to convince the FAA that a firewall was not needed or change our design to add one. The US market was not big enough to fund this level of risk. However in Venesuela we were able to get certified for commercial operations via a process that resembles experimental aircraft approval in the US. Just in time to have the sugar market collapse among other things.

I can name other examples of quashed innovation if the group is interested. I can even give examples of innovations that deserved to be quashed.

As for manned vs unmanned risk, clearly we are not thinking along the same lines. You seem to be talking about something like risk to non-particpants from untethered wayward mega-sized kites crash landing into school houses miles from their assigned position. Yes, this is a good risk to mitigate via regulatory oversight.

I'm talking about pile driving the $100,000 prototype kite into a farm field head first at the end of it's tether. Why should the FAA care about that?

We haven't even touched airspace usage issues. Or hazards to other aircraft.

The FAA regs have different sections for different aircraft. Jumbo jets have different rules than Piper Cubs. I guess we as a community need to figure out how to classify systems into risk profiles to determine proper levels of oversight.

Brian Turner

Whale Bumps! Professor Crackpot scores another press-Release!

On the real wind energy yahoo groups, we've spent the last couple years making fun of "professor crackpot" and his whale bumps. See, wind turbines and airplanes have been using turbulators to "trip the boundary layer" for 100 years.

Turbulators can be little tabs on the upper surface of a wing, a strip of sand in glue, or sandpaper stuck on a wing, or even a string or fishing line glued onto the suction side of a blade, just before the boundary layer separation point. Also golf ball dimples.

Often if we let the paint drip off the leading edge, we have defacto whale bumps, as on the turbine seen in this video{
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1yc40ky6zU

You can always tell professor crackpot by his signature exaggeration: Saying we'll get the same power at 10 mph as we do now at 17 mph. Sure!!! Only an idiot would make such a claim. Real wind turbine people flag this as idiot talk.

Yeah I even thought up a new name for these tubercule turbulators a couple weeks ago on a real wind energy group:
"Tuberculators"

Nice Superturbine(R) Dave S.!
:)

Attachments :

To be fair Doug,

"trickle in"
When did it last rain there?

Hailstones pelting outside right now.
Got my Fladen Survival Suit from Stornoway Fishermans coop ready for some real harsh weather tests, ... once my toy is built.
must speed up.

It was interesting that one of those announcing sites still featured the Magenn artwork! 

This idea is one of the more reasonable ones in that it could actually work, still be there the next day etc. It does not try to bite off more than it can chew, and is simple enough to be attainable.
The main challenge will be to make the envelope strong enough to survive storms, while light enough to remain aloft. Also being blwon to the ground during storms might be an issue. Finally the economics must work out for at least some use.
:)
Doug S.

 

1.  http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2011/2011-10-24-091.html  has more detail on the prize situation.

2. Toward the mention in this thread of shape  is this borrowed post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kitepatents/message/675 

Nykolai Bilaniuk

Airborne Wind Powered Generator

Application number: 12/999,638
Publication number: US 2011/0101692 A1
Filing date: Jul 16, 2009

Click image for the full application for patent:

Discuss claims and related issues:

• The aerostat kite or kytoon is employed.  Lift the complex that holds turbines aloft. Send generated electricity down the kite's tether.
• The meta idea is not new. It will be interesting to see detail claims and study them.

This might be another example of energy companies choosing a loser to use to condemn a whole branch of the competion.  The last I heard, helium from natural gas in Texas was still being vented if not sold immediately, which should be an international, intergenerational crime.  Using it for what could be a big market is also crazy.  People are still spooked by the Hindenberg, but it's worst liability was the nitrocellulose dope covering the exterior.  Hydrogen leaks even worse than helium, and is a potent greenhouse gas, but it gives 11% more lift and is easy to produce anywhere from water and electricity.

AWECS gained energy could be shared to keep steam/air heated in large LTA.

One thing that would help Hydrogen stop being the Fuel of the Future would be a handy catalyst that would oxidize Hydrogen leaking from a surface.  Perhaps a layer of Urethane or other plastic could be sprayed over a dusting of catalyst to provide a reaction zone on terrestrial fittings as well as kytoons.  The system might also provide a strong visual or radio indication of leaks beyond the capacity of the catalyst and oxygen supply to resolve.

all good points
I forgot to mention that they have yet to encounter the main challenge in wind energy: overspeed protection.
Ah those little details.
Always fun to put up a "new" machine. And fun to pick up the pieces after the first storm! yup that cubic power curve turns into a real negative factor when the storms hit!

Right On Darin - hydrogen. Self-made on demand (they hate that!)
Best of all, they can hire Dave S. to be a spokesman: "See I told you it would never work!"
:)

Hey one thing I noticed years back: DOE, NREL, and ARPA-E can't kill your idea unless you waste all your time trying to convince them in endless-paperwork proposals. Let sleeping dogs lie. And lie. And lie. :)

NASA can't kill your idea unless you waste all your time trying to convince them to even be involved.

The patent office can't kill your idea unless you waste all your time trying to convince them that your ideas are inventions through patent applications.

Dave S. can't kill your project unless you waste all your time trying to convince him through lengthy diatribes online.

Trade shows can't kill your project unless you waste all your time attending them.

Issuing press releases can't kill your project unless you focus solely on discussing and defending your idea before it is built.

The FAA can't kill your project unless you waste all your time discussing future rules for a thousand unproven and ill-defined ideas.

Google, Makani, Magenn, and the well-funded players can't kill your project unless you waste all your time fixating on them - heck let them kill their own projects!

Major universities can't kill your project unless you waste your time trying to get them involved.

Professor Crackpot and his whale bumps can't kill your project unless you spend all your time fixating on the Professor's latest, desperate attempt at raiding the common cookie jar through another tantalizing press-release.

But
in combination
these entities can definitely kill your project, by sheer intimidation and distraction.
Let them all go
and just do it!

:)
Doug Selsam

Dave S.
banal: Pot? Kettle? Black?
obviously you have no time after blogging to build anything