Oshkosh 2009

We have more than just one WWI replica here. Over in the Vintage aircraft section, a member brought their replica of a Macchi M.5 flying boat. This was a single-seat aircraft used by the Italians in the WWI, but universally, everyone who saw it immediately exclaimed, “Porco Rosso!” I guess there’s a lot of Hayao Miyazaki fans out there!

After wandering for a bit, I did my first interview of the year with Bill Steele of VirtualHUD. A Heads-Up Display, or HUD, lets you track information like speed, altitude, attitude, direction, engine vitals, and more, without having to look down at an instrument panel. Instead, it’s displayed on a transparent screen.

Except this is an innovative system for displaying your instrument panel on the back of your propeller!

Regular monitors and television screens fire a stream of electrons at the phosphors on the back of your screen, causing them to glow one line at a time, building up a picture in the process. VirtualHUD shoots a laser beam (well, four laser beams, red, green, blue, and an infrared beam, creating a full color display) at the back of the rotating propeller…which reminded me of those early attempts to fire through that same propeller disc!

Drawing an image on a rotating propeller turns out to be a very difficult task. First, there’s the difference in rotational speed from the tip…which is traveling at nearly supersonic speeds…to the hub. After the interview, I mentioned that Edison encountered the same problem, albeit at a much slower speed, with the phonograph. His solution was to use cylinders instead of discs.

Additionally, propeller speed changes almost constantly, and on propellers with variable pitch, the angle of the blades changes as well. And that’s just with two-bladed propellers — more blades, more variables to consider.

Mr. Steele went through a number of prototypes before realizing he could use a single rotating mirror to achieve this effect. This worked, but it was still too slow; inertia was a problem. So, he shrunk the whole assembly down to less than a millimetre in width (something I find analogous to Harrison’s solution to devising a timepiece to win the British Admiralty prize for solving the longitude problem).

The final unit is light and portable, not much larger than a pocketbook. It can be used with any airplane with a propeller in front of the pilot (even that 172 you rent on the weekend). Very, very cool.

Mr. Steele (at left) works at Microsoft, so between his VirtualHUD and his computer background, we went full-on geek for a solid hour. Zack will have fun trying to figure this one out, although it’s probably more comprehensible than the interview I did with the propulsion guy from NASA (damn, that was so much fun!).

After the interview, we discovered it was raining. A nice warm summer rain. Then, someone turned on the faucets and it started coming down like a horse pis…uh, in buckets. The afternoon airshow was canceled, and the concert…by the Doobie Brothers (“suddenly, it’s 1978!”) was two hours late. We opted to be “Don’t Bes” and passed on the concert. I like rain, so I went out and wandered among aircraft until I was thoroughly soaked.

That wasn’t a problem. It was the chill wind which blew the storm clouds out and turned my lips and fingernails blue that was.

Here’s a gallery with some more pictures. I’ll post about Day Two, including the A380 arrival and seeing White Knight Two fly tomorrow (and maybe even with some video!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 2:04 am and is filed under Oshkosh, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.