The plane and team have been through an exhaustive test program over the past six months. Our number one commitment was to safety and insuring that every system had been methodically testes in various flight conditions. This took a great deal of discipline considering the temptation.
Every flight to date has been well thought out with very clear objectives and data to collect. Unfortunately, I was not one of those data collectors. And for good reason, I was not qualified. Dave Morss, Butch Pfeifer and Ken Erickson on the other hand are HIGHLY qualified. So, it feels kind of weird to be surrounded by all this talent and feel somewhat of an outsider on your own team. Mostly because they have experienced something I have not, flying the Turbine Toucan.
They also understood something I had not; unless you’ve flown the aircraft, words just don’t describe the experience. It was something unspoken but also something very clear to Dave, Butch and Ken.
Well, all that was about to change! Ken, Butch and I felt that we have the airplane and the program at a place that we can finally have a little fun. The amount of confidence they both had in the aircraft is what lead up to a very special event in my life. I get my first crack at flying the Turbine Toucan. Talk about gratification. Building it is one thing, flying it just completes the story nicely.
So, on Friday the 30th of October, I finally flew the little Toucan!
Without going into a lot of detail, WOW just seems so meager a word for the experience. The acceleration on take off is something close to 4 G’s, never experienced that kind of performance before. Perhaps equally impressive is the rate of decent one can do. While practicing for my first landing (at altitude) I was exploring decent rates when bring the power back to idle, which I typically do for short approaches in the Pitts when abeam the numbers. In order for me to hold best glide (100mph) with the power back, I was having to point the plane almost straight down. Last time I looked inside the cockpit, I was passing 4500 feet per minute decent to keep 100mph. Damn.
So much for my typical Pitts short approach. It’s a plane you bring in under power, about 120kts over the fence to be exact. Over the threshold you come back on the power to idle and in about a seconds time you are about 80kts and in the flair. Simply amazing.
What I found to be incredible is just how fast it can decelerate. Going from 180kts to 120kts when I was entering the right 45 only took a few seconds and boy did the harness snug up in a hurry! I thought I was going to be thrown out of the cockpit, which I’m used to, doing aerobatics not straight and level flying….did I mention all the left rudder it took to keep it straight when you come off the power? Sheeesh.
I’ll be writing a lot more about flying the Turbine Toucan as I practice our time to climb record attempts in the coming weeks. I’m sure the vertical performance will be a story worth reporting on. In the mean time, Ken and team will have a few exciting posts coming up next week.
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One of the most exciting parts of my job is sharing the Turbine Toucan with all of you. It is an exciting journey full of potential. And it is the realization of the potential that is so rewarding. Some of that gratification will just have to be delayed, not denied. As we’ve mentioned in our blog, Air show Buzz and several articles, we are excited about attempts to break not only a speed record but also two significant time to climb records.
We had originally planned on making these attempts over the summer but quickly learned that waiting until the weather got colder was a much better idea. Nice cold air will just give us the ability to generate more power, so the end of November was selected to make the attempts.
It was our original thought that obtaining these records would help with the endeavor of securing sponsorship. Most of the companies we have met with to date clearly understood our program and the aircrafts potential to shatter a few records. We have had very productive conversations with highly targeted potential partners, all which have been very encouraging, but that is for another conversation.
After considerable conversations with potential sponsors, one thing was quickly realized; anything newsworthy regarding the Turbine Toucan was of great value to our potential sponsor. In light of this, we have postponed any “official” speed or time to climb record attempts until our sponsorship is officially secured.
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As we might have shared on the website, Infinity Entertainment is committed to creating an experience for airshow fans that goes far beyond any single performance. Access to both the airshow aircraft, the support aircraft, to the team members and to the support equipment is a philosophy we are committed to once we hit the road.
Every other motorsport provides fans access to pit areas to see the crew, the support equipment, the transporter and of course the drivers. Why should airshows be any different? We’re not saying this doesn’t happen, it just doesn’t happen enough.
We observed over the years that at many airshows the performing aircraft are sequestered off the ramp where fans have little or no access to their favorite performer or aircraft and we think that is a shame. After going to a Champ CAR event a while back, it was clear how many fans were completely into being around the pit area. All the graphically wrapped tractor-trailers, support equipment and team members made for a very impressive event within an event.
It is this kind of access that really created another level of excitement at venue. And we took note! As part of our support equipment, we had two custom support carts built for the Turbine Toucan. One is a start cart; the other is for fueling/defueling and show smoke (which is a proprietary blend).
Pictured below is the new start cart. It carries a Tesla Industries GPU with 3500 cranking amps @28v, 20ft. GPU cable set, a 110v GenSet, Telemetry Computer and displays, support tools and cleaning equipment.
We’ll upload photos of the fuel cart as soon as it is done, which will be in about a month or so. We’ll also keep you posted on progress of the tractor-trailer. Obviously we are waiting as long as possible to get started as every potential sponsor needs are different regarding hospitality.
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Well,
Bad weather the past week has kept us all from doing any flying. But it hasn't stopped our trek for finding the perfect sponsor. Susan Cress has been working hard on targeting what we consider key CPG (consumer package goods) companies. What is key is finding the right brand that shares or is aligned with the Turbine Toucan's core brand attributes. It's a long sales cycle but an exciting one too. We've met some fantastic people who are extremely excited about the program. Though some have already earmarked budgets for 2008 season, they were very interested in the program, which is very encouraging.
Ken Erickson has been hard at work supporting Sean D. Tucker and team. They are getting close to winding down their season now, which will give Ken some time to work with the Turbine Toucan for next year's season.
Dave Kervinen is getting ready to work on a few time to climb records slated for Nov. 29th of this year. We are working out VX/VY numbers on paper and trying to determine a few profiles to go out and fly. Though we have a lot of drag, we also have a lot of wing area to utilize. So, keeping the speed down and the climb angle high is key. But, it's all theoretical until we just go out and do it ten plus times. More on this subject in the next few days.
Have a good weekend!
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We get a lot of questions about the support tractor-trailer, so we thought we’d share a little info. As soon as the trailer is done, we’ll have dedicated pages on the website for it, so stay tuned.
For any of you that are interested, our tractor is a fully loaded, CAT powered Kenworth T2000. The trailer is a 53’ Kentucky single drop air ride trailer with belly boxes. It has 4 hydraulic levelers, 25ft hydraulic side door for hospitality, spiral staircase to the roof (for the best seat in the house) along with a 40kw three phase generator. The trailer is also equipped with satellite uplink for high speed internet access, has 14ft crew/sponsor meeting room and a large area for spare/support equipment. The list goes on and on but you get the idea.
For the few that are interested, we’ll keep you posted from time to time on the progress
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Infinity Entertainment and Tjaart van Rooy of VR Avionics have been hard at work increasing overall performance of the Turbine Starter/Limiter monitoring system. In a few weeks time we will now have full In-Flight limiting of all parameters. This is a huge step forward for Team Turbine Toucan. When we are flying hard charging, low-level aerobatics, we are looking outside the cockpit.
Though we have crew monitoring trends on the ground and reporting any unusual trends to the pilot via a discreet frequency, it still requires pilot input to correct the exceedence. The latency in communication from the ground to the pilot might only be a few seconds, but that is a critical few seconds when you can overspeed N2 or have large spikes in ITT.
The new system completely eliminates pilot input for corrections, which greatly reduces pilot workload when high power and low altitudes are experienced.
Tjaart has also added significant telemetry interface updates for the ground crew. Now we can completely data log the entire flight. We can also display on a graph all engine parameters, which now give you graphical trend data in real-time. This allows us to play back historical data and map it with any particular maneuver to see what, if any effect it has on the Turbine.
This is really ground breaking technology for Turboprops! We can’t thank Tjaart and Maurits enough for the continued support; it is this kind of dedication and support that has made the project a reality.
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The sales and marketing department at Infinity Entertainment have been working feverishly to recruit the perfect partner (sponsor) to campaign the Turbine Toucan for the 2008+ airshow season. As you know, the Turbine Toucan was exclusively developed as the ultimate communication platform for a fortune 1000 company. We’ve had a lot of interest to date, which is very encouraging. The team has been doing a great deal of traveling in the pursuit, so we all apologize for not keeping the blog up to date in the past few weeks. We are again hitting the road for another week of travel and look forward to sharing as we move through the process.
Weather has been very weird around the bay area, not at all conducive for flying, which makes us feel a little less guilty. We’re hoping to do another photo flight before we get heavily involved in the exploration in the vertical. We’re still planning on working on several world records in November. We’re also in the planning stages for our promotional video, so we’ll keep you up to speed on that as well.
All for now, thanks for your continued support!
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Today represents the pinnacle in the test phase of the Turbine Toucan. Our very last systems tests were an overwhelming success. We developed a proprietary oil system designed to help prolong vertical flight. The system performed flawlessly today. We simulated oil pressure loss and the system took over and provided oil at the exact same oil pressure. The system worked transparently, the engine never knew the difference.
This represents the last of the system testing and we are now going to explore the vertical, as soon as next week. We are so darn excited that the system worked just as it was designed to, how rewarding is that!
We also took the time to go out and take some new photos. Kind of a hazy day because of a 50,000-acre fire just south of us but still fun photos to share. We’ll post them later this evening. We plane on photos next week around San Francisco if the weather behaves.
Check out the Multi Media page for new photos soon!
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We have received countless e-mails over the past few months from the RC community world wide regarding scale models of the Turbine Toucan. We are happy to report that Quique Somenzini has made a great deal of progress on several fronts. It is one thing to build a one off model, it is another thing to create production kits that are great flyers and typical of the kind of Quality Quique is know for. And that takes time.
Quique has made several prototypes now and he is closing on on a final design which he is very excited about.
We can't wait to share with you Quique’s progress, which will happen in about a week’s time. So, that said we urge you to stay tuned, as we have some exciting things to share! Have a great weekend!
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OK,
The team was out in Florida for business last week and wow was it hot. We had a very productive time while on the east coast but boy, the humidity in Miami and Orlando was just over the top. You forget just how good you have it in California until you go to Florida in the summer.
After being gone for a week, it is time to get back to work here at home! We just received our new turbine FCU (fuel control unit), which was sent out for mods and spent today installing the new unit. It works perfectly and we'll plan on resuming some fun Flying later this week.
We are starting to work on much-anticipated video and air-to-air stills by the end of the week. Thanks for all your patience on that one. We have one last team member that is going to get checked out in the plane within a few weeks, that would be David. David will start to work on time to climb records as the weather starts to cool down a bit.
That is about it for the short term. Have a great week!
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Quique Sominzini’s just shared with me the third prototype of the first RC Turbine Toucan kit and all I can say is WOW. I think you all will be very pleased based on what I saw. Quique has had to make considerable mods to make the RC Toucan a good flyer, mostly CG related. He has been doing a great deal of work on it and I think it will really pay off.
I know that Quique is very grateful for your continued enthusiasm and patience. I for one am putting my order in now! That and a dust pan and I should be good! We’ll keep you posted when we here more about delivery dates for the kits.
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Greeting,
Monday’s flight represented our first flight out of and back to San Carlos (KSQL). It was another squawk free flight, which is what the entire team really needed. We are gaining considerable confidence in the aircraft and aircraft systems. We have one last system test which is our proprietary oil system for sustained vertical flight, we’ll be testing that as soon as we start to explore the vertical characteristics of the plane.
Both the oxygen system and bleed air heat performed flawlessly yesterday. So, that is now behind us. We also did performance and cruise profiling at FL155 to FL175.
Our last flight also brought home some realities with it as well. One thing is for sure; we are starting to hit the wall aerodynamically speaking at 15,500ft. We are producing so much drag with the blunt wing tips that we are fairly certain we’re not going to see anything near 215kt indicated at FL320. We’re simply producing way too much drag. And since this was not the fundamental mission of the airplane, we’re not going to make much changes airframe wise to clean things up.
We are still confident we can brake the 323mph record with a little clean up work around the aircraft. Gap seals, I strut fairings and all will help.
Next week we’re finally going to do some much needed photo shoots. We will be doing this the next 4-6 flights before we dive into building our air show routine for next year.
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All the final systems for the Turbine Toucan are now ready to go. Bleed Air heat, Oxygen and a variation in some fuel management totalled out the weeks work. The plane is now for a series of high altitude test flights which will start next week. This will be the conclusion of the test phase of flying before we get in to the aerobatic mode.
Yours truly will be jumping into the cockpit and start preparing for time to climb and airspeed records, which we'll go for before the end of the year. Have a great weekend all! dk
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As of Thursday night, we have all the systems just about installed and ready to be tested end of day Friday. The bleed air system was a lot of work and is now about 90% done, shouldn't be much more past noon on Friday and we can test the bleed air out. If all goes well, we'll button everything up and get it back in service by Saturday.
We've almost done an annual on the plane, inspecting all the various components at 40+ hours and everything looks very good. As soon as we get the systems complete and in the air for testing, we can start two thing; VIDEO and working on our 2008 Airshow routine.
Everyone has been hounding us for video, I promise you'll start to get some soon.
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Well, we mentioned yesterday was going to be a big day, and it was. The best possible senario, a non event. As soon as the plane was back, in the hangar it went and off came the wing root fairings and all the side panels. Time to get moving on the bleed air system and oxygen system. As of dinner time yesterday, the o2 was up and running, with on demand system working perfectly.
The rest of the week will be dedicated to getting the bleed air system designed and installed. Just waiting for parts and we should wrap this up by the end of the weekend for a high altitude run next monday.
This will be the last of the system check out and then we'll be focusing on learning to fly in the vertical.
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