Day 11

Godzilla stepped on me and my day

They said it would happen, a frustrating day of research. We got to the valley around 9 and they started splitting the groups up so that the vegetation group and the archaeology group would get some help. However, by the time the split happened, I asked around and the new groups had formed, and I would just be an extra body which I was told wouldn’t really help unless we had more GPS units. Since we didn’t and our group still had more points to gather, we continued with our original group. We were told that William’s Aerospace was going to show up around 10 and start flying their UAVs. The plan was to fly the multispectral and FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) sensors. Because we are in the UAV group, we were told to be back around that time. That doesn’t leave a lot time to gather points, but we tried anyway. While out in the field, we decided that if they show up at 10, they would need an hour to setup and a half-hour to fly, so we wouldn’t really need to back until 11:30 at the earliest. So, we got more points, until both of our cameras ran out of batteries. That was only the first thing to go wrong.

After our batteries died, we hitched a ride back to base camp and found out that Williams still wasn’t even there yet and it was 11:30. Once they did show up, they flew their smallest UAV as a test with no sensor on it. It was fine, but then we went to launch the big one and Jeff Williams was running through the tall grass to launch it and tripped and basically threw it into the ground, crashing it.

We spent the rest of the day waiting for them to setup their third UAV with the FLIR, but that never got off the ground due to multiple problems. While we waited for that, Iam flew his tri-copter from yesterday and it had so much turbulence from the wind that it collapsed and crashed too. Not a good day for flying and so, not a really good day for imagery. Too bad we didn’t just fly the phantoms more.