Vertiflite May/June 2021

Virtual Meetings—Powering Through a Full Year VFS continues innovating after a full year of technical webinars, interviews and virtual chapter meetings.

A fter a full year of precautionary measures related to COVID-19, VFS continues to provide webinars on relevant vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and electric VTOL (eVTOL) developments to keep members learning and actively engaged. Links to past and future webinars are available at www.vtol.org/webinars . By Jim Sherman, VFS Director of Strategic Development

a fantastic overview of the challenges of fighting the 2020 fires in LA County. VFS Stratford Chapter: Motion Amplification and Camera-Based, Full-Field Vibration Techniques The VFS Stratford Chapter held a virtual chapter meeting on Feb. 24. The meeting featured Jeff Hay, CEO of RDI Technologies, Inc. This presentation provided an introduction to RDI’s Motion Amplification technology, applications and case examples with videos. Motion Amplification is a patented video-processing technique that detects subtle motion and enhances that motion to a level visible with the naked eye. The technology can resolve motions as small as 1x10 -5 inches (250 nm) at 3.3 ft (1 m) and can be performed live and in real-time, making it suitable for a range of applications from product design, test and measurements, and research and development, to field-based machinery fault diagnosis, dynamics and structural testing. VFS Philadelphia Chapter: Development of the Kitty Hawk Flyer

VFS eVTOLWriters Group Interview: Embention

On Feb. 17, VFS organized a group interview with Embention’s Javier Espuch. He provided an overview of various products that Embention is developing for drones and scaling up to work with eVTOL cargo and passenger aircraft. Espuch focused mainly on two product areas: Veronte, which provides customizable autopilot functions, and NMAND, a family of platforms that can be customized for many applications, including surveillance or photography. VFS East New England (ENE) Chapter: LA County Fire—Air Operations

On March 10, the Philadelphia Chapter held a virtual dinner meeting with Cameron Robertson of Kitty Hawk, where he was the principal engineer of the company’s Flyer ultralight eVTOL. Robertson gave a detailed and revealing history of the Flyer and the rationale for the transition to the current, high-performance Heaviside eVTOL demonstrator (shown, lower left). VFS Technical Program: System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) for Flight Testers On March 9, the Electric VTOL Flight Test Council — a joint effort led by VFS with the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Society of Flight Test Engineers (SFTE) and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) — held a webinar with Dr. Nancy Leveson, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The webinar demonstrated the benefits that the STPA process

The VFS ENE Chapter sponsored a virtual chapter meeting on Feb. 23. The meeting featured the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Patrick Sprengel, Battalion Chief, and Dennis Blumenthal, Chief of Helicopter Maintenance. This talk provided

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