CarterCopter Technology Demonstrator will be at Oshkosh

The CCTD will participate in the 50^th Anniversary of the EAA AirVenture fly-in (www.airventure.org). It will fly in on Sunday, 21 July and be showcased on the Aeroshell Square - AirVenture's premiere display location. Jay will meet with EAA officials on Saturday to determine its arrival schedule and flight plan. The CCTD will receive special routing and will be accompanied by a chase plane filming the event. On Friday, 26 July, at 12:30 PM, the CCTD is scheduled to perform it first public flight demonstration -- lasting about 10 minutes. The demo flight will entail a short-roll jump takeoff to about 30 ft, followed by several passes at different speeds. It will conclude with a short-roll landing.

The flight demonstration may be repeated on Saturday. The CCTD will depart on Sunday.

The CCTD's performance at AirVenture will be limited because it remains the only prototype. Once a second prototype is available - or all fight test goals have been met, then public flight demonstrations will be more dynamic. The performance data that the CCTD provides during flight-testing is priceless - and much data still remains to be collected. Our primary goal is to fully understand this revolutionary technology so we can license it for production worldwide.

Dual flight controls and automation is successful

The most recent flight-test series concluded on Friday, 12 July, with great success. The final of four flights lasted 46 minutes, which is longer than any previous flight. There are no problems with the new dual flight controls, and the automatic controls indicate they will work as planned once we tweak them properly. The few remaining problems, such as the airspeed control wanting to hunt, should be easily fixed during the next flight-test series.

Besides the minor problems with the new automatic controls, two minor problems occurred with the rotor blades - but nothing that caused concern. On Tuesday, 9 July, the trailing edge at the root of one of the rotor blades split open during pre-rotation to a higher RPM than previously attempted. Over-speed during pre-rotation, causes very high air pressure inside the blades. The blades are built with a shear web down the middle of the blade to complete the torque path so the blade can continue to carry the torsional loads should something like this happen. Following the incident, both blades were reinforced in this area and the flight-testing continued. The new Extreme-mu rotor that will be installed following Oshkosh is designed to prevent this type of incident all together. After the fourth flight on Friday, 12 July, a very small crack was found in one of the trim tab extensions, and was easily repaired. Again, the new rotor has a different design that will prevent this from happening.

During these flight-tests, we limited pre-rotation RPM to 340, due to the small amount of weights currently installed on the stabilizer bar. There will be no stabilizer bar on the new rotor design, so pre-rotation will go as high as 400 RPM. Using only 340 RPM and half the available collective, the CCTD was jumping 30 ft into the air after a short roll to 20 mph. This was made easy by the new automatic controls, which automatically balances collective with airspeed. Once the new rotor is installed, the CCTD should do 50 ft jumps using 9-10 degrees of collective. 

EAA support

The EAA is making a major effort to welcome the CCTD at the AirVenture fly-in, taking place this coming week - Tuesday, 23 July through Monday, 29 July.

CC has greatly benefited from the environment that EAA creates in this country. The US is one of the few places in the world where innovation and experimentation by individuals is permitted and even encouraged. This is not the case in most other countries. The EAA recognizes the CCTD for what it is, a grass roots effort that has tremendous potential for solving aviation problems worldwide. This recognition is exemplified by the EAA allowing us to display the CCTD in Aeroshell Square for the duration of AirVenture

CarterCopters' Oshkosh schedule

* Official EAA activities.

Mini-forums are in the CC exhibit tent

NOTE: the above schedule lists 2 official EAA forums. It also lists the 4 unofficial mini-forums we will present in our tent exhibit. Depending on the initial response to the mini-forums, we may repeat some of them or add additional ones. A schedule will be posted at the tent.

40' x 40' CarterCopter tent exhibit

The Eclipse 500 exhibit will be bigger - but considering our limited personnel and financial resources, the CC exhibit will be equally as impressive. As most CC followers know, our limited resources are reserved for our engineering and flight-test programs. If you can join us at AirVenture, you will appreciate the tireless effort of our CC shareholders and volunteers. I think you will be impressed.

The CC tent exhibit is located in spaces #271 & 272 - the second row from Aeroshell Square. The theme of the CC exhibit this year is --

CarterCopters LLC

We license our technology - WORLDWIDE

* Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation

* Fully scalable technology to fit requirements

* Goals: (1) safety, (2) efficiency, (3) simplicity

Special presentations:

• X-Plane - the software used by CC to explore potential flight-test problems. Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, will be available Thursday through Saturday.
• Golden Arm Association -- the experimental test pilots who run the CCTD flight-test program. Paul Smith, president of GAA, will host the display.
• Redding Machine Shop Inc. -- machines all parts for the CCTD and has recently made parts for the E-plane (first manned electric airplane).

Flight simulators: this year we hope to have two of them available -

• CC flight simulator used in the CC flight-test program, on which visitors can try flying an X-Plane version of the CCTD.
• Mac laptop running an X-Plane program, on which visitors can try flying an X-Plane version of the 1903 Wright Flyer or the 1923 Cierva C.4 Autogiro.

VTOL-UAV built using CC technology: the actual aircraft, with a 10 ft. wingspan, will be displayed Friday through Sunday. Its creator, George Mitchell, will host the display and explain its design and the construction process. George lives in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and built the aircraft in his attic as proof that CC technology not only works - and is also very simple in design.

Special guests & exhibit attendees

A number of special guest will be joining us at AirVenture - some coming from as far away as Spain, Austria and England. Stop by the CC tent and/or the CCTD in Aeroshell Square, to meet them in person. If they are not available to meet with you at that time, we will try to schedule an appointment or tell you when they are expected to be present. Members of the CC gang will be at the tent exhibit and at the CCTD to answer your questions.

• Paul Smith, USAF Lt.Col. (ret). Paul is president of the GAA, the group running the CCTD flight-test program. He lives in California.
• Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane software -- lives in the Columbia, SC area.
• Larry Neal & Brad King, the CCTD chief test pilot and flight test engineer / co-pilot. Both live north of Dallas-Ft.Worth.

• Dr. Bruce Charnov, Hofstra University, New York. Bruce is hosting an international conference in April 2003 on the autogyro. His book on the subject, covering autogyros from the Cierva C.4 to the CarterCopter, is due to be published soon.

• Heriberto Soler & Carlos Diaz are coming from Spain. They represent a group exploring the possibility of building a production plant for the next generation CC in Spain.
• Helmuth Wernhart is coming from Austria. He heads an effort to build a CC production plant in that country.
• Mat Recardo is our guest from England. He builds detailed computer models of aircraft and creates animations using Lightwave software.
• Mark Fisher, X-Plane model designer for CC -- lives in the Washington, DC area.
• Just about everyone you have seen mentioned on the CC web site will be present, including employees and active shareholders.