Capstone - At last a successful flight

Yours truly, originally uploaded by Pitprops.

Well its been a long time coming, but at last we got into the air, and managed to get some photographs.

The picture is one of several I took today from about 100feet with the rig suspended from a Seigers Fliegers mega delta. It is of course, your photographer. The other pictures can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pitprops

The day didn't look to be that good for KAP. When I got to the park there was no wind, and we spent most of the morning and early afternoon struggling to keep ultra-light kites in the air. A couple of roks and a small ghenki were about all that would stay aloft.

Then the breeze picked up a fraction and it looked promising, so I decided to give it a go. I ran out the mega delta and let it lift into the sky. It looked promising as the kite stayed steady at about 100 feet. But when I attached the camera to the line and let it out, the camera flew horizontal and managed to reach teh spectacular height of about 10 feet before returning to earth. It looked as if this was going to be another unsuccessful afternoon as the camera rig lifted and dropped several times.

Then a breeze picked up and suddenly the rig was airborn. Ah. Idiot alert! I'd forgotten to turn the camera on. DOH!!!!!!! So had to walk the camera down and turn it on, then let it climb again. Finally we were high enough to snap away. And the results can be found on my flickr page.

A successful first flight with some pleasing results, but need to lear how to tell the orientation of the camera. Also, I discovered that I could only pan in one direction. On bringing the rig down, I discovered the gear on the pan spindle has come loose, so that needs to be tightened before the next outing. Next Sunday looks like a trip to Tonbridge recreation ground. Hopefully we'll have a bit of breeze and we can get some more photos and I can get used to handling the rig a bit more.