Successful dry land tests!!

It's been a great day! With help from Adrian and Kelly I have successfully tested the hovercraft in the Redwood City shores boat ramp parking lot!

It's been almost exactly 4.5 years in progress. I was able to successfully control the hovercraft and do laps in the parking lot.

We started with another towed hover test.

We discovered that there's a bunch of dust/and dirt. And unfortunately for my helpers it flys outward quite effectively when over a puddle.

Muddy spray from crossing the puddles

A little bit of mud on the skirt. 

For further testing we decided to stay away from the puddles if possible. And we moved onto testing with the thrust fan and trailing ropes for safety.

Following that I demonstrated being able to travel straight and turn around.
It was a little exciting as the return was downhill.



And here's the view from Adrian's camera.




I started getting pretty confident at stopping and turning around.




Here's Adrian's view.

Not all turns happened as desired...




A gentle brush with the curb.

Slight contact with the curb

And here's the flight afterwards.

And Adrian's chase footage.

Improved flow through the thrust fan

As I identified in the last post there's quite a bit of pressure buildup in the thrust fan. So I've been reducing the drag induced by the protective grill.

The 1cm width is narrower than necessary. So with help from Wim, I've removed every other wire from the front. And 2/3 from the rear of the thrust fan housing.

With these gaps I still cannot reach the propeller even if I try with my hands since it has 3+" of clearance at the front and 6+" inches of clearance at the back.

View from the front of the reduced lift fan grills

Back left view

Back right view

In this process we removed a lot of clippings. The ones I collected weighed 2.4 lbs. Not bad for decreasing the weight at the back.

Most of the clippings removed

Clippings bundled in cling wrap to be weighed. (2.4 lbs)

With so very unscientific testing of standing downwind of the fan, it felt noteably stronger. And throttling up and down did not result in the front grill flexing like it used to do. 

We held back on the lift fan since it's both closer to the pilot as well as lower volume due to having back pressure. With the improved fan mounting the craft is floating much higher, but the CG is still notably aft. To take a passenger I'll probably need to add weight at the front with the current configuration.