Back to the Basics of Lift

I have had more than a few interests in my life—often frivolous at first blush. There have been far too many different interests to actively be involved in all of them at once, so I tend to be engaged in something for a while, then box it up and shelve it. If you looked through my shop, you would find boxes containing Beta fish breeding equipment, pottery tools, squash equipment, sheep shearing tools and, of course, pretty much every type of model airplane you can think of.

I pulled one of those many boxes off the shelf this week, and I have been amazed at how it has come to consume my train of thought again. The box was labeled “PRS” for Portable Remote Sensing. To be honest, PRS has never been fully shelved; it has been lingering in my grey matter since Murray and I started the project. With the Bolivia group going to map CERENID next month and an old friend, Dawn, working to create an information database for project sites, the need for good remote sensing data increases. My mind has shifted back to airfoils, amps, thrust, and lift.

I feel like my mind is reloading memory slots at the front of my brain with information I had pushed to the back. I have started sketching and drawing, thinking and evaluating. I stare off into space and recall what I have done, then start inserting new information gathered since the last time I did this. New camera information, new GPS equipment, better servos, smaller gyros and so on. I revisit old locations for inspiration and new ideas. I spent time inside my plane room--standing, thinking, experiencing new thoughts and feelings. I tried, somewhat successfully, to penetrate to the heart of the issue, savor the moment and energize my mind. Time well spent!

That night, only a few hours after new possibilities opened to me there in my plane room, a new drawing file appeared on my computer. It will morph over the next few weeks, and then the dust will start to fly. Years of diverse experience and fresh new ideas will combine to produce one black box. The contents of this box will have roots in the basics of lift, the fundamentals of aerodynamics.
I love to look ahead, but I have learned that you must never forget to look back first. There are physical laws that govern our universe, and there are past experiences that govern our perspective. With the exception of the bumble bee, things don’t fly that don’t conform to applicable physical laws; our new experiences, too, are more likely to ‘fly’ if we reflect on what we, and others, have learned before us.