On April 24 two skydivers will attempt to swap between two nose diving planes and regain control. Digital Trends speaks to the engineer behind this world-first.
What can you do in 45 seconds? Could you skydive between two planes that are in a 140 mph vertical nose dive, regain control, and avoid the rather final hard stop at the end?
“My background is in race airplanes and breaking records, but this is the opposite, it’s about how we slow down the airplane. From an aerodynamics perspective, that was a challenge. When you see the big picture, it’s two people swapping airplanes during flight and that’s very scary. But we don’t see that big picture, we see the small pieces that allow us to get there. That’s what this project is, it’s how you make this crazy thing not be crazy.
“It’s at least five times larger [than what I thought it would need to be],” he explained. “I thought it would be four feet by 12 inches over the wings, and now it is 6 feet by 5 feet and on the belly of the plane. It’s attached to the landing gear and another hard point in front of the fuselage, and it uses hydraulic actuators to work.”
The solution turned out to be simple : “We created a gap between the fuselage and the speed brake, so the air flows through it, and that jet of air protects the tail from the flow of air created by the brake.” At this point, it’s also important to remember there are two planes and two skydivers having to cope with all this. “We have a formation flight and both planes need to fly together, so you may think the natural solution would be to sync the two planes together,” Iscold told us. “We’re not doing that. They’re independent. We adjust them to behave in the same way, and when we’re doing the dive the autopilot is working to keep the pitch and heading correct.
With further examination, Iscold found the problem. “We knew one plane had a slightly different center of gravity, and what happens is when you’re vertical the speed brake is like a parachute, and you want the center of gravity to be behind the parachute, if it’s above it’s not stable. So we’re playing around with this and it makes a difference. It’s obvious when I say it, but because the project is so big and complex, we lost track of it.
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