He went on to explain how Ivan was building a Pearse reproduction and what they needed to test before lift-off. It sounded like something straight out of an adventure novel - revisiting the pioneering days of powered flight, proving (or disproving) long held and debated theories, specialists, engineers and enthusiasts teaming up and contributing to this historically significant project. How could anyone not want to be part of that?

On the grand scale of things, Metermaster’s involvement in the project would be small but it was still to provide essential pre-flight information.

In short, with ‘the Pearse’ attached to a trailer being towed down the Whenuapai runway, Chris would need to measure lift generated by its wings and lateral forces created by tail plane adjustments. The lift information was to come from load cells mounted between the trailer and each of three wheels on the undercarriage and was to be collected every second (along with wind speed and data from the lateral load cell) stored on a computer in the towing vehicle and graphed - dynamically - and of course, to be faithful to the original design calculations, all figures were to be in imperial units. No problem. Well..

Not to make it all seem too easy though, the load cell outputs presented another problem! The scaling would rely on a stable power supply and although the hardware could be powered from the towing vehicle, this would introduce a risk of noise (interference). So Chris opted to strap a good quality aviation battery to the trailer. Good or not though, battery discharge would need to be taken into account. (A 0.5V drop in battery voltage, would result in an 88 pound change in scaled values.) That alone makes comparing results of different runs difficult enough but to add to this, there was still the question of what ‘nominal’ voltage to use in the scaling. Fortunately, PicoLog provides a solution.