Looking at where helicopters fly, and how they fly, is not so simple at the moment. A mixture of clever text editing, a Matlab script, some awking and finally a dab of GMT is required.
This will change shortly, as all these development tools consolidate - or someone comes up with something completely different!
The simplest job is just plotting where the helicopter went. To make a plot like the one to the right, here's the recipe:
- Make yourself a working directory to play in
- Copy the INS 1Hz file you're interested in plotting into the directory you just made
- copy the shell script 'map-ins-data.sh' into your directory
- open the script and modify paths to source files, map scales and regions as required. You can make a 3D plot by commenting out the GMT commands for a 2D plot, uncommenting the 3D plot commands and adjusting the azimuth/elevation to suit
- tell your unix terminal 'sh ./map-ins-data.sh' and you'll have yourself a map in no time.
Now, lets get some idea of which way the helicopter was facing when aerial photographs were shot, as you can see to the right. Here's the recipe:
- Create a working directory to hold your various concoctions. There are a few.
- Locate a relevant flight summary file [<flightname>_camera_ins_utm.csv], and copy it into your new directory.
- Open this file and replace all commas with spaces - then save it as 'shotsummary-ins-gmt.dat'.
- in the same directory, run a set of commands wrapped into a shell script called 'photo-heading.sh'
- Adjust the region paramaters and scale, and you'll have a map showing the flight track and which way the front of the helicopter was pointing every time a photo was taken!