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Aviation history was made on Friday the 21st August 1998, when a radio-controlled pilotless aircraft crossed the Atlantic Ocean guided by satellite and landed on a remote island off Scotland.
"I am very tired and very excited. This has been a great day", said Bill Vaglienti, an aeronautical engineer with Insitu, the small Seattle, Washington, aerospace research company that designed, built and launched the drone from Newfoundland. "We had been feeling very low until now but now we have the world record", Vaglienti said by telephone from South Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland. "It was a great, quick landing with no damage at all", said Vaglienti. He added that the drone, named Laima, had seized the world record for the first unmanned trans-Atlantic flight when it landed on South Uist just before 2 pm after a 26-hour flight. Actually, they don't have the record yet. Thierry Montigneaux of the Paris-based Federation Aeronautique Internationale said the team had seven days in which to register a claim to establish whether or not Laima was in fact the smallest unmanned plane to cross the Atlantic. He said : "We don't have a category for unmanned planes, but because of the small size of this one it may be that we could register it in the model aircraft category if it is confirmed as the smallest unmanned plane to complete that flight". Viglianti said his team would claim the world record once all the data for the flight had been collected. "We're sure there has been no other unmanned flight across the Atlantic, and certainly no such flight with an aircraft this small", he said. A second unmanned craft, named Millionaire, launched by Insitu from Newfoundland two hours after the first, was overdue late on Friday and Vaglienti said he was concerned. "Obviously, there's a margin of error but if we don't see it by 8:30 pm, we will declare it down", he said. A clearly elated Viglianti described the moment when his three-man team first made radio contact with the aircraft as it headed in : "It was about 25 miles offshore when we picked it up on our systems and that was really something. "We were then able to take control of it and guide it towards us manually using a joystick - just like a model plane in the park. Landing it was pretty routine, but the feeling of real excitement when we detected it first was just great. We're planning to fly home tomorrow to Washington State - but only after we're got ourselves drunk tonight". He added : "This makes you feel that it was worth all the effort. We'll hopefully get the next in safely too. That will mean we've landed the first two unmanned planes ever to fly the Atlantic". An AFP report |
| OTHER ARTICLES OF ASI SEPTEMBER'98 ISSUE | News In Brief | Letters To The Editor | World Records | | A Tale Of Two Quantums | | The Flying Castle Which Finally Crashed | | Applied Sport Psychology : Peak Performance | | Bridging The Gap | | Aircraft Crosses The Atlantic Without A Pilot |  More articles on Aeromodelling
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