TerraBreak.org: An independent Design/Build/Fly (DBF) support site

This year marked our second effort in acquiring times for all the missions. This year we tried expanding our coverage by recording takeoff, lap, payload, and box times. We're still learning how best to collect this data, and how best to keep people interested in collecting this data. As such, we only recorded Saturday's times. In the coming years we'll do our best to improve our data collection methodology, but for now you'll have to make do with this. With this in mind, Please look at the following bullets before viewing the speed analysis.

• Speeds are calculated based on an "ideal" circuit based on the flight path figure supplied in the 2004/2005 rules…. 3500 ft/lap for the single 360 missions, and 4260 ft/lap for the two 360 missions.
• The data collected was done independently of the competition organizers: This data is not official data, and does not include penalties incurred.
• Do to a lack of volunteers and inexperience, not all the flights were recorded.
• Do to the proximity of the volunteers the data might not match exactly with the competition recorded time.

Bottom line is, use this information while understanding the limitations of the data presented. This data is intended to enlighten, inform, and to educate. If you have better data, we'd love to have it to check our data, and to share with the rest of the DBF community. The use of the 3600ft course length means that this data has a major flaw… it does not represent the actual instantaneous speed of the aircraft, since we'd need the actual distance flown. Instead, this data represents a comparison of the speeds obtained by the different aircraft, which is a reflection of course distance and aircraft speed. A second "error" introduction is that these times include landing times, which might skew the results a little. But I feel its important to include this time in the speed calculations, since the landing speed is included in the score calculation. Perhaps next year we'll bribe a cop into letting us borrow their radar gun so we can get some instantaneous speeds; or maybe we'll invest some big $$ for a GPS acquisition devise.