My Plane

So I'm in a class this semester called Senior Design. Since I'm in aeronautical engineering, the ultimate goal of the department is to get its students to gain experience putting math to the test. This is done in by forcing us to build a remote control plane. While you think this may be easy and fun, I assure you it is neither.

The same professor has been in charge of the class for about a decade. In the 20 semesters or so, all of the design constraints have lent themselves to allow the teams to build planes you think of when you think of a R/C plane; all have been several pounds in weight and were designed to fly outside with stall speeds around 20 to 25 mph. Luckily for me, this time he decided to go in a completely different direction and require that the plane be able to takeoff, cruise, and land in a 25*50 ft room while having a stall speed slower than I can run. This plane has to also be unusual in shape and theme; one team is building a flying squirrel, another is building a stingray, a third is building a dragonfly, and we are building a Purdue logo. Oh, and we have to drop something from our plane in a designated drop zone.

While this task is daunting in itself, before building it (which begins this weekend), we have had to back up our design with analysis. This means a lot of math. I don't really mind that, but I do mind having to trust the results of other members of my team simply because doing it myself would require me to re-learn things that I really disliked the first time I learned them. Also, while most planes are designed for years and then built and tested for years again, we are given 9 weeks to design, 2 weeks to build, and 4 days to test. I'm not sure whether I'm being too much of a wet blanket, but just to make sure I'd like to note that my team has one less person than all the other teams because one of the original team members dropped the course.

It really hasn't been as difficult as I made it sound, but I have put in about 25 hours a week outside of class on this thing and, consequently, it's tough to keep up in my other classes. I look forward to the end of this semester because it means I'll be finished with this class, will have graduated, and won't have to rely on anyone with anything less than a Bachelor's degree anymore.




Okay, since I'm at the site I'll update this post. The design phase went relatively well; the groups gave two presentations a week on specific parts of the design and sometimes our presentations were drilled for inaccuracies, but for the most part things were okay and the problems were addressed. The build phase went by pretty quickly. I was at the build site, which was a loft in a lab at the airport, at least five times a week for the two week build. Since there were only two in my group, including myself, involved in the structures part of the design, we didn't ask the other group members for much help in building the plane and they didn't seem to care very much about not building it. The thing was made mostly out of balsa wood and, since a main goal in designing a plane is limiting weight, the structure was pretty light and fragile. It was probably best that not many people got involved in the build. Anyway, we had to redesign the landing gear since the original struts were too bulky and thinner struts would have been too flexible, but it didn't really matter much, as I will explain in the next paragraph.

There were only three flights. One was a glide test in which the power was cut immediately after takeoff so the landing wasn't rough. The second was outside since people worried it may not be maneuverable enough to fly inside. It ran into the curb once, which was scary, but no damage was done thankfully, then on the second try it flew for about 7 minutes before landing in the grass. The landing gear really didn't do anything but get in the way on the grass landing and it ended up poking through the bottom of our plane. The third flight was our public demonstration; it only flew once and the pilot landed the plane inverted so the landing gear was only useful in keeping the propeller from hitting the ground during takeoff.

All things considered, I didn't lose too much sleep over the plane and it flew, so I'd say it was successful.