Back in the swing

Well, our return to Villa Carmen could have gone better, at least initially. On flight 1 I got overly ambitious, tried to land in a very small area, and nailed a tree pretty good. That broke a wingtip off, so it was time for repairs. I put the wing back together and found a decent place to fly from, but on our first flight after the repairs I found that the geometry wasn't quite right (it had a strong tendency to roll right. I twisted it back and thought we were ready to go. We put some weight in the nose and sent it up. It still rolled right and the extra weight caused me to stall as I was trying to clear the trees on the right side of the field we were flying from. The stall dropped me a few meters and caused me to clip a wingtip on a tall cecropia, sending me into a spiral that put the plane down nicely right in the top of a tree.

After retrieving the plane (the methods are confidential) I decided that it was worth the risk to use the new style of wings that gave us problems the first time we were here a few weeks ago. I also put on a new tail. So, we were basically flying a new plane.

Yesterday it rained all afternoon, which precluded any test flights, so we finally got around to it this morning. We had 2 excellent test flights where we got all the parameters dialed in just how we wanted them and got the plane flying quite nicely. We decided that the afternoon would be the perfect time for a real mission.

I put together a flight plan to map 380 ha of old growth forest across the river from the station. We sent it out and everything went quite smoothly. The only problem was that there was a ridge I didn't know about, so we had to abort halfway through to avoid flying into it. Even so, we collected imagery of 200 ha and built our confidence quite a bit in the plane we're flying. Tomorrow, assuming the weather is cooperative, we will really get to what we came here for... mapping of one of the last great wildernesses on earth.