Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, to mount the GoPro camera on the nose gear. That way, it would retract and deploy with the gear…great idea, right? Unfortunately, it seems the GoPro camera case wasn’t designed for the impact of nose touchdown. You’ll see on one of the videos of a touch-and-go, that the camera case opens up and the camera is just loose when the gear retracts. On the next landing, the camera comes out (I wasn’t recording that landing) and ends up in a bunch of pieces on the runway. I noticed the camera missing when I got back to the hangar and called airport ops. They did a runway sweep and found it and returned the bits and pieces to me.
Here’s some pictures of it mounted:
Here’s a video of the takeoff, landing and one more takeoff with the camera.