Friday, June 13, 2008

Flying with an external video camera

I bought an Aiptek HD digital video camera on Amazon.com recently. Just for fun I strapped it to the right-main landing gear of my 172, basically adjacent to the wheel hub. I wanted to do a test flight like this to see if the video was watchable and whether there were any problems from vibration, wind, &etc.

Much to my surprise it worked just fine! The only problem was that I underestimated how far the main gear "sinks" when the weight is taken off of it, so the camera ended up with about a 15 degree right-tilt while in flight.

The flight was rather mundane, I was just hopping over to Madison (52A) for gas at dusk. I sped up the cruise portion of the video to make it shorter. Also, there's no audio. I plan to try and use this technique to make some more interesting videos in the future.