Tag: Flying

In the world of high-end cameras for shooting movies and video, the RED brand is at the top. These cameras are so awesome that they are what major directors are now using to film Hollywood blockbusters.

What you see in the photos here is one of those rare items that is at the same time both awesome and supremely stupid. The man you see here is from China and is named Shu Mansheng.

This new thrill-seeking robot actually base-jumps. That’s right, a robot seeking thrills and showing off. It will climb up the side of a building, then jump off and deploy a paraglider to fly back down to Earth.

I have a thing about heights. I am not scared of heights really, I have no issue flying in an airplane or helicopter. What I have an issue with is being up high and having nothing between me and death but a rail or less.

I can remember when I was in grade school. On free days in gym, the coach would give us a bunch of paper and we would see who could build the plane that flew the longest.

A little while back we talked a bit about the very cool looking Kyosho iOS controlled helicopter from Japan that had surfaced. The thing reminds me a lot of the Parrot AR.Drone in a smaller and cheaper form.

The SEED is an autonomous, mobile camera balloon created to take photos and video of you while you’re on vacation, but I honestly see a lot of Big Brother implications. It also reminds me of the Kinos in Stargate Universe.

The guys at the ETH – the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have the best jobs on the planet. Not only do they get to play with flying quadrocopters all the time, and have built a special arena just for doing so, they’ve now got them flying using gesture control.

This 20-foot dirigible replica was made by Jack Clemens and it took him two and a half years to build. Apparently his cat destroyed his first model. It goes to show you that cats can be vindictive!

Got a couple of fancy quadrocopters floating around? Why not teach them some cheap tricks – like how to juggle balls. The guys from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are up to their flying quadrocopter shenanigans again.

I’ve heard my share of horror stories of people dropping their iPhone 4 out of their pocket and having the screen shatter on impact. That’s why I was amazed when I read about this iPhone 4 which was accidentally dropped out of an airplane – and survived with nary a scratch.

Man has been flying for a very long time and early in the development of aircraft, we tired designs that mimicked birds with flapping wings and things never worked out well. The cool part about birds and insects that we still can’t fully recreate in man-made aircraft is the amount of lift and propulsion they can generate with small surface area wings.

Next time you see a giant bird flying through the skies, you might want to double-check that it’s the real deal. You could be looking a remote-controlled fake.

If you’ve ever dreamed of capturing high-altitude flight videos, you probably thought that would be something you could only do with an expensive UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) like the $30,000+ Draganflyer X8. Well, thanks to the guys at Team BlackSheep, you could be flying high for as little as $2000 bucks.

When I think about DARPA building robots, I envision something along the line of the Terminator or Johnny 5. That isn’t what DARPA has in mind though (at least in this project) as one of its projects has hit the prototype operation phase.

I have tried my hand at flying remote control helicopters a few times. Once the copter flew away never to be seen again. I suspect this was a response to seeing how poorly I landed my RC plane.