Has anyone done a night launch glider?

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terryg

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I am trying to come up with ideas for an upcoming night launch and wonder if anyone has done one.
 
I have not heard of a night launch rocket or boost glider, but no reason one could not be done, either free flight or radio control.

There is a huge array of led light systems for model aircraft out there, including some designed for micro RC models where the entire model weight is only 1-2 oz before lights are added. These micro light systems only add a few grams of weight to a model and will run on a very tiny one cell lipo battery.
 
Yes, we have seen several versions of this over the years at the Narhams night launches. The boost gliders have been anything from foam gliders with LEDs to balsa deltie air shows with small glow sticks taped to them. Each part needs some sort of light and it takes more than one person to track them.

kj
 
Used to do plenty of these back 20 years ago when we had local night launches. I'd use the skinniest lightsticks to line the edges of larger deltas, those looked good but were harder to see. Also, painted like a 20" diameter Invader type glider with phospho glow paint, this didn't hold its 'glow' well enough as it began to 'die' sitting on the pad, and then flown a bit later.

Easiest way is the simplest: Just parasite a decent sized delta (such as a 2x OT sized) glider off a MPR rocket booster, and line both with glowsticks, or even todays LEDs.

Sure miss those days...never to return.....
 
Here's a thread where I documented two R/C RG's that I added lights to. I did it for the Night Launch at NARAM-51 in 2009.

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showthread.php?4680-Night-Launch-at-NARAM

Message #6 mentioned the first one, which unfortunately shredded the wing on a test flight. I doubted I'd have time to convert another, but I did. It is described in message #14.

And message #18 is after NARAM-51, with updates and more pics. Also a link to a video Chris Taylor shot, showing the last minute of the glide from one of the flights.

[video=youtube;jvu3iZA2vow]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvu3iZA2vow[/video]


Indoor test on tabletop, no lights except from the model.
bXggsTL.jpg


On pad
MDRkQhq.jpg


After landing

uRsB9vu.jpg


Of course, it had so many super-bright LED's, some in color, to be able to see its orientation to fly it by R/C (The video shows how well that worked out). For a non-R/C glider, only a few LED's would be needed. Around 1978 or so we had a night launch and I had two old fashioned red LED's on a glider, sticking out left and right. But it was hard to see from 100 feet or more away because those old LED's were not too bright.

- George Gassaway
 
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A couple of years ago, I added LED light strips to the sides of a Radian Electric Sailplane. Left side red, right side green. Powered by the same 11.1 v 2200 mAh battery as the plane uses (The BEC circuit cuts the throttle when the voltage gets low, plenty left to glide down, so no problem with the LED's killing the radio gear in mid-flight).

Those LED strips were super-bright! When flying at about 100 feet, the green side actually lit up the ground for hundreds of feet. It was hard to pilot because of the lack of wingtip lights to be able to tell the banking angle, but that was mostly a problem for preparing to land. Added a red and a green "finger light" to the wingtips which helped, but that was a one-shot temporary solution as the batteries in them died before the flying was done for the night, and they were not as bright as the LED strips.

Anyway, as we were flying it, a guy on a motorcycle was driving by. And then he stopped for awhile, and finally rode off again. He clearly had stopped to try to figure out what the heck it was that he was seeing, since from a distance it looked like a bright skinny red or green horizontal light, depending which side you saw. Wish I had some video of it.

- George Gassaway
 
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