World Scenic Flights by HeliGraphix

The next day we got up at 04:30 AM (don't ask when we went to bed!) in order to drop our rental car before boarding the plane to the Australian Outback. Due to a little confusion at the filling station (the rental company had no signs in the car at all what fuel it uses) we ended up with the wrong fuel in the tank – and broke down a kilometer later, still four kilometers away from the airport. It was clear we'd miss the flight; luckily a nice guy from Peru helped us and took Saskia to the airport. While she arranged that Qantas gave us a later flight I was standing in the rain for 2 hours waiting for a tow truck and dealing with the rental car company. Shit happens!



Ayers Rock is simply amazing! In the language of the local Aborigines it is called Uluru; not too far from it lie The Olgas (Kata Tjuta), another interesting rock formation and significantly larger than Ayers Rock. Both were formed about 800 million years ago in the same geological process; the whole land was flooded several times, and mud, sand, gravel, pebbles, rock, etc. accumulated in depressions. The whole mixture got heavily compacted (we're talking about geological time spans here!) and was finally pushed back to the surface. Erosion formed the structures visible today; and yes, this means we just see the tip of a much larger formation extending a couple of kilometers down into the earth. Please note that unlike Kata Tjuta the Uluru mainly consists of arcose sandstone; its original color is grey, but it contains a significant amount of iron minerals. The weathering process forms iron oxides which account for the nice red color; the whole mountain and desert around are rusting, if you want. :-)
Ayers Rock is about 350 m high (The Olgas over 500 m) and has been declared world natural heritage by the UNESCO (yes, these guys are everywhere! It is a mere matter of time until the whole planet is a UNESCO world something heritage …).



The local resort is called Yulara; it's basically a couple of hotels around a ring road including a supermarket and a filling station. That's it, and you won't find anything else in a radius of several hundred kilometers. The main language there is German! :-)
We inspected our baggage and found that the "fragile" stickers of the airline actually mean "please drop it extra hard!" Repairing the Three Dee MP-XL took about three hours, but it was nothing that couldn't be fixed. On this occasion we discovered that the main drive wheel showed strange signs of wear (see picture). The teeth in four parts of the gear wheel were heavily worn leaving big grooves between what's left of the original teeth. The four areas are the consequence of a slight noncircularity of the drive wheel (that's nothing unsual). As to what causes this strange kind of abrasion effect we're not absolutely sure. We have marked everything and will inspect it after every flight.



BTW, our last FP 4900 mAh pack was significantly ballooned after the air transport from Sydney to Ayers Rock – this is actually the first real indication that the constant transport under low pressure conditions may be (one of) the problem(s). The spare packs from Rainer Hacker (fedexed by Nicolas and BBT) should reach us Tuesday evening in Hawaii.

Both Uluru and Kata Tjuta are sacred in Aborigine belief and they were given back to them by the Australian government in 1985. Today the whole area is a national park; you can visit it for a fair entrance fee but have to follow the rules which means don't leave the marked paths, only stop in special viewing areas, etc. Not so good for flying; but then, there weren't too many people around so you could just jump over the fence or walk a little into the desert. Temperature? We had everything from 10 to 30+ degrees centigrade.
Okay, are the flights a homerun then? Not really, for several reasons. First difficulty is the weather; at least during our short stay it kept changing constantly. The funny thing is that the clouds appear out of nowhere within half an hour, but they do not move. After some time they simply dissolve and rematerialize somewhere else. The very moment it gets cloudy the wind freshens up to a point where your cap gets blown off; this can happen within less than five minutes. The next thing is, clouds cast big shadows onto the Rock – and this makes it look very dull in the picture.
The bottom line of all of this is: Find a good spot to fly where the Rock is not too near (so it'll fit into the picture) but still looks impressive, then wait in the car for as long as it takes, and when the lighting situation seems to get well jump out and fly.



The hotels at Yulara Resort provide (expensive) internet access; you get a fast download connection, but the upload is as slow as 2 KB/sec. which means most programs give up due to timeout when uploading pictures. This was the reason why we couldn't update the blog for three days. But transfer of the digital material to the computer, picture screening and selection, then post production and finally data backups kept us over-busy anyway. It's insane how much time such straight forward computer work takes – one day is nothing at all!

All in all the trip to Ayers Rock was both a success and adventure. To those of you appreciating the silence of a desert, the only sound being caused by the wind flowing over the landscape, combined with a clear vision till the "end of the world", we can only recommend this place.



The very cool image above is a pure HeliGraphix shot outside the WSF. Apropos, don't forget to check out our regular website as well! In our latest video we explore what happens if you fly with your R/C helicopter through a car wash. :-)

Right before boarding the plane to Australia I was taken aside and told that there was a security problem with our baggage. But no reason to worry, the lady continued, the officers had just opened and resealed it … You can imagine we had a very nice 9.5-hour flight, constantly wondering what Asia Airlines might have done to our baggage and which one of the two boxes (helicopter box or transmitter, power supplies and chargers) had been opened. These guys had been unfriendly at check-in as well; they are Star Alliance member, we're booked on Star Alliance, but they just wouldn't give us the respective conditions (they have to!) but charge us overweight instead. Annoying.

Sydney really is an expensive place; to reduce cost we had prebooked one of the more budget backpacker hotels (and this still costs a lot!). Well, the room is smaller than ever, we do not have electricity (except one light, but no sockets) and we have to share the showers with 200 other people. This minimalistic size of the room is a new record, the only other places that can keep up with this one were at Mount Cook/New Zealand where each of us had to share the bedroom with 7 more people (separate rooms for male/female!) and in France. Below is a shot of our mobile communication platform. :-)



We arrived in Sydney early this morning, and for the first time since this continuous trip has started we rented a car. The main reason is that on Thursday our old friend Andrew Palmer from New Zealand will fly all the way to Sydney to have fun with us for one day. That's true spirit and we very much look forward to seeing him!
For just a few bucks extra we got a sat navi; it's made by Pioneer and the most user-unfriendly device we've ever seen. If you type in a target and drive according to the instructions, how's it possible that the distance to the destination keeps increasing?! Does it lead you the other way around the globe? Also we set it up so it won't be using toll roads. And boom - 10 minutes later we end up in the first toll tunnel without cash booths. Damn, to avoid a toll infringement notice we now have to call the guys and give them our credit card details.

Regarding battery packs, thanks for all your input! Nicolas Kaiser did a lot of research and called today - it seems we'll be co-sponsored by Kokam. That's good in a way that in the past months quite a number of people had written to us anyway and asked how's Kokam compared to Flight Power. It will be interesting to see whether the ballooning is a FP specific problem or a general one.
Jan Henseleit also left us a message and offered his own packs. Ken Yap wrote in and said he would be able to organize AirThunder packs for us. Marc Endres discussed the problem on RC-Line forum, and they came up with the same suspicion we have: The low air pressure during the long distance flights might be the problem for the ballooning. Andrew Palmer called this evening and reported there's no hobby shops in Sydney carrying 12s battery packs.

BTW, we'd like to seize the chance to explicitly thank the Big Boys' Toys crew (manufacturer of the famous MANIAC blades and carbon accessories) who provide the WSF FedEx logistics. Nobody believed this would become such a crucial part to make the WSF project a success. Thank you very much, this is appreciated!

Next problem is that for some reason FedEx sent the two spare 3700 mAh FP packs via United Kingdom to Andrew Palmer in New Zealand (he was supposed to bring the packs to us on Thursday). The time delay is fatal as they will not arrive in NZ before Andrew boards the plane to Sydney. So we're currently trying to reroute the parcel to the location here and to collect the packs when we come back from Ayers Rock, just prior to departure for Hawaii. (How come that always when it seems we could take a quick break something like this happens?!)

As you see the WSF are as exciting as ever and you can actively influence them by leaving comments. This is the project of a big team rather than a handful of people; like mentioned often before, HeliGraphix is "open source". Be part of the new flying era and join us for writing R/C history!