This weekend has had beautiful weather so I pulled out the FPV rig for a couple of days to get some flying in. On Saturday I was down at our big field and set up the FPV and let quite a few other guys look through it while I flew. I let my friend Ollie fly the plane with the video headset, from the planes perspective. He had never done this before but he had no problem doing it and did a great job with the take-off and landing. I’m trying to get more people in the area into some FPV flying so I’ll have people to talk about it with locally.

I captured most of his flight on the recorder, but the video format is a bit weird and landing got cut off.  Just keep in mind this is someone who’s never flown First Person View before, aside from maybe a flight simulator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO7rUj0N4KM

On Sunday I went to my local field and let some of those guys check out some of the video as I flew as well and they all thought it was cool it seems. My friend Al who flies giant scale planes is there so I asked him if I could fly around him while he was flying his big plane, he had no problems with that so I got some fun video of his 30% plane flying around while I glided around.

I pushed the height envelope on an earlier flight than the one above and got up to 1000 feet. I’m sure I could get much higher with the equipment but not at this location that’s for sure. You can see the Hudson River, the Thruway and the Catskill mountains quite well from this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-k3qojUvag

I wish the video quality on my FPV recorder was a bit better. I’m using an Aiptek DZO-V50 which is one of the few recorders I could find that would record through interference but it compresses the video quite badly. Then the video gets compressed again when I upload it to YouTube. I’d like to switch to a GoPro HD HERO camera so I could record HD video while doing my FPV flights and hopefully get some great high rez scenery shots as well.

That’s it for the FPV stuff for now, I need to go drag all the bins and boxes and planes out of my truck from the weekend and get ready for another fun-filled work week.


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