Flying Powered Parachutes - Luecke

[Flynlow]

I was excited when my flying group decided to meet in Smithville. Smithville has a bit of very unique landscaping. A local rancher cleared his land for cattle in an interesting way. He removed most of the pine trees, but left enough to spell his name – LUECKE. (Go to Google Maps and type in Smithville, TX and then zoom out!) The name is almost 2.5 miles across. The letters are huge.

Saturday morning we took off and headed toward the trees. We actually went down inside the letters and flew around in them! The winds up high were smooth, but a little too brisk, so I couldn’t get high enough to get a good shot of all of the letters, but even down low they make for some interesting photos.

Hope you enjoy them.
















































If you look closely in this picture, you'll see a powered parachute. This will give you an idea of how big the letters are!

[lfmerrell]

I had seen NASA use of those trees with astronaut photography.

Link: Astronaut-acquired Orbital Photographs as Digital Data for Remote Sensing: Spatial Resolution

5.5. Empirical Confirmation of Spatial Resolution Estimates:>>> We also made an empirical estimate of spatial resolution for lower contrast vegetation boundaries. By clearing forest so that a pattern would be visible to landing aircraft, a landowner outside Austin, Texas (see also aerial photo in Lisheron 2000), created a target that is also useful for evaluating spatial resolution of astronaut photographs. The forest was selectively cleared in order to spell the landowner's name 'LUECKE' with the remaining trees (figure 10). According to local surveyors who planned the clearing, the plan was to create letters that were 3100 ´ 1700 ft (944.9 ´ 518.2 m). Photographed at a high altitude relative to most Shuttle missions (543 km) with a 250-mm lens, Formula 3 predicts that each pixel would represent an area 28.6 ´ 36.0 m on the ground (table 5). When original film was digitised at 2400 ppi (10.6 mm/pixel), letters correspond to 29.4 ´ 18.8 pixels for a comparable pixel size of 27 – 32 m.

[JamesAg96]

Awesome pics. Saw a powered parachute flying over South College Station a few days ago, had my 2-year-old son and I completely transfixed.

[bburton]

A truly magestic series. Most impressive. Well done.

[Flynlow]

Thanks for the nice words. I love flying, but find that I need my photo fix as well. The other pilots will often hear me telling them, "turn to the right just a little bit..."!! When the sun goes through the chute just right, it's hard to take a bad photo.

@James - I'm not sure who flies one there. We're a pretty close community. I had a friend that had one there, but sold it to another friend of mine in Austin.