Well, since this is the last blog post, I figured I’d reflect back on my overall experience in the Sailplane class this year, and what I’ve learned throughout the year.
The first lesson I learned in Sailplane, from the first day of class, was that there was going to be tons of information thrown at me, especially during lectures. Sure, this seems obvious, but the key thing I took from this mass of information, is that most of it was way over my head as a little Freshman, and that that was perfectly fine. As the year progressed, after paying attention to lectures and taking notes, even if it seemed pointless because I didn’t understand anything, I found that things were slowly starting to make sense. Even though I understood only the basic principles that my professor was writing on the board, and not the overarching background and details involved, I started building an arsenal of knowledge that I’ll keep in the back of my mind. Eventually, when I take those junior and senior level classes, I’ll have this basic and minimal understanding of these concepts. This may seem pointless, but in engineering, even a tiny bit of background knowledge or previous experience with a topic can make the world of a difference when attempting to grasp new concepts.
Secondly, I learned that not all upperclassmen are big and scary. Ok, so this may seem very juvenile of me, to say that I was “afraid” of the big kids, but nevertheless, I was certainly intimidated by their mass of knowledge and big aerospace vocabulary. As the year progressed, I began to learn how ridiculous that assumption was. With the nature of the sailplane course (having it be a four year class), everyone gains knowledge as they grow within the class. Naturally, the seniors have the most knowledge about both the design and building method of the HPA. However, when the seniors leave in May, they take all their knowledge with them, meaning that we lose our best classmates. What does this mean? It means that the seniors are eager to share their expertise with younger classmates, so that we can carry on with the class when they leave. They told us from day one that if we had questions, to simply ask them. Unfortunately, I’m typically a fairly shy person around people I don’t know, and was reluctant to ask for any sort of help. As I began to get more acclimated to lab and the work environment, I began to feel more comfortable with my fellow classmates, and began to ask them for their input. Since that point, they have been the most wonderful people to get to know, and they are a great resource to not only learn a lot about engineering concepts, but also to help you build a network.
A nice reminder to our classmates after finishing our horizontal tail. 🙂
Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, I learned that ENGINEERING CLASSES CAN BE FUN!!! I know, it seems absolutely preposterous that any engineering class could be outright fun, but sailplane has been one of those classes that I legitimately have looked forward to going to (though perhaps not as much when the class is at 8 AM in the fall). Naturally, lab is of course oodles of fun, especially with the goofballs in my class. From using a carbon tube to hit DBF‘s Wiffle balls out the window, to tossing hand launched gliders out the window at innocent bystanders, to heating chicken wings with a heat gun (possibly cancerous?), lab has been a great experience (I promise we actually do work there). Surprisingly, even lectures are enjoyable in themselves. When you have a professor like ours (who, coincidentally, looks exactly like Harry from dumb and dumber, except he’s way more intelligent) , it’s impossible not to laugh at least 10 times every class. It also helps that he has the peanut gallery (us students) commenting on everything he says. In fact, today in class, my professor pulled a Key & Peele (if you have no idea what this means, watch the video below) and used his TA as an anger translator, and it was honestly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
“I really think we should have a wing section built soon – DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN KNOW WHAT WINGLETS ARE?!?”
Warning: Explicit Content (they really just say a lot of curse words).
Finally, while Sailplane was all of these things and more, the one thing that is most important to me is that it made me fall in love even more with the major I chose for myself. Going into college, you can never really be sure that what you’re doing is what you want to be doing for the rest of your life. There were times that I questioned whether there were other majors that better fit my interests or my skills, but as soon as sailplane really got into full swing, I realized that I did pick the right major. That reassurance is one of the most important things that has come out of this class. In the end, while my first year of sailplane is almost over, I know that as I continue with the class, I will continue to explore the interest in flight that my PopPop first inspired in me. And for that, I will forever be thankful for this wonderful program.
Sailplane Fun Fact: In lab we actually do have a flying f**k. It has a propellor and everything. It literally does fly. This is why Aerospace Engineers are awesome.
slowly (in an attempt to not break the tubes and waste carbon- a precious resource in the sailplane lab), you can hear a small “pop” when the tube is finally free from the mandrel. Then it’s just a matter of playing tug of war with the tube (literally, that’s exactly what it feels and looks like). With this tube in particular that we made, after removing it, it was then used for testing. However, the test was very informative, as we did some tweaking to the tube before this test. We found that the carbon tube was breaking under tension, which is something that it shouldn’t do, due to the nature of carbon itself. Nonetheless, this first test found that the tube withstood a bending moment of 29 ft-lbs. This gave us a (conservative) factor of safety of 1.5. This is fairly good, however I’ve been told that with the HPA we usually try and aim for a FOS of about 2. To reach this goal, we tried covering the tube with fiberglass, as an added form of strength for the tube. After testing this, we found that the modified tube held 77 ft-lbs, which is a FOS of 4. While this may seem like it gives us an obvious direction to move in with making our tubes, adding that one fiberglass layup to the tube is extremely time consuming. In the end, we are thinking of possibly just adding another layup of carbon. This might not prove to be as effective as the layer of fiberglass, but it will do the job without wasting too much time. If you would like more information about carbon tubes (and especially if this post looked like it was in another language) you can check out the interesting links below.
Last week in lab in Sailplane, we certainly had an exciting project going on! The point of this lab session was to test a composite tube. Sounds simple enough right? Well, not exactly. When I first arrived at lab, the guys had already gotten a drill bit stuck in a 2X4 just trying to build the stand needed to test the tube. Eventually, after trying several times, they were able to reattach the bit to the drill and reverse it out of the wood. Next, since the hole still needed to be drilled, they proceeded to stick the bit in the wood again, but luckily, it did not get stuck again. After the stand was built, we beefed it up a little by wrapping heavy duty rope around it several times, which at least kept its movement to a minimum. We then proceeded to spend fifteen minutes cutting up rope to tie around gallons of water. Why you ask? The gallons of water would be strategically placed along the composite tube so we could find its deflection. Deflection is essentially how much the tube will move when it is put under load. A gallon of water doesn’t really seem heavy enough to break a composite tube does it? Trust me, water is MUCH heavier than it looks. Imagine holding your arm straight out from your body, and having someone hang 10 gallon bottles of water from it. Ouch. I don’t want to do that. But that is essentially what we did to our poor tube. After tying the rope around all the gallons, we took measurements at about ten different locations from the ground to the middle of the unstressed tube. After marking the ground where the measurements were taken so that we could make sure we measured from the same location every time, we began loading up the tube. After placing one gallon bottle at each of the pre-measured locations, we recorded the length from the ground to the tube. Since it did not break, we proceeded to add another gallon at each location, and the tube still did not break. After measuring with two gallons at each point, since we no longer needed the tube and had gotten all the information we needed, we decided we just wanted to break it. Now we were inside during this whole thing, so that added a bit of a concern to the test, but we decided to go for it anyway. We had two people hold a 2X4 underneath the end while we moved all of the gallons to the very end of the tube. They then began to lower the wood slowly, but once we heard the tube begin to crack, we got cold feet and took the water gallons off the tube. We decided it wasn’t worth putting six people’s lives in danger just to break a tube for no reason. All in all, it was certainly an informative and exciting lab session, and if you’d like to see us loading the tube, I’ve included a link to the video below.
First off, it may seem weird to dedicate half a post to a location on campus, but the Stuckeman Family Building, which houses various architecture-related majors, is a fairly interesting place. Anyways, for a little background information, the other day, my Sailplane group leader sent me up to Stuckeman. One of the professors and his Grad Students there help us out by cutting our foam ribs for our wing section using their LASER cutter. So I started off on the walk from Hammond (down by College Ave) to Stuckeman (behind Forum) with four pieces of foam board and no clue where I was going. After finding the building, it took me a little while to find this Professor’s office, but I did find some interesting things in my travels. Since it’s home to architectural engineering, naturally the setup of the building itself was very unique, but they also had landscape and structure models in little cases that were neat to look at. After finding the office and dropping off the materials and the accompanying CAD file, I started the trek back to Hammond. Fortunately, at that time I realized I didn’t get a run in that day, and since I only had my phone to carry and I was wearing running clothing, I just decided to jog back to Hammond. Unfortunately, we just found out last night that the LASER cutter is broken, so we might be waiting on those rib pieces for a while.
Now onto that NASA launch. For those of you that don’t know, NASA launched their Antares Rocket on Tuesday, October 28th. Antares was on a mission to resupply the ISS (International Space Station) with various different technologies and provisions. In a launch, NASA Safety Officers have the option to essentially hit the self-destruct button on a launch that they deem unsafe shortly after liftoff (talk about a stressful job). This is exactly what happened Tuesday. A few seconds after liftoff, the rocket began to respond incorrectly, however the exact reason for this issue is still unknown. Because of this mishap, a Safety Officer hit the self-destruct button, resulting in the colorful explosion shown above. What happens now? Well naturally, whenever a launch has to be aborted, NASA loses what little money the government still gives them. Factor in the loss of equipment in a scenario like this, and its basically like taking millions of dollars and chucking it in a fire. As in any failure, information can still be gathered from what went wrong. The loss is still a heavy one for NASA, but thankfully no one was injured at the Wallops Testing Center. And not to make “light” of the situation, but we did get to see a Fourth-of-July-worthy fireworks display in the middle of fall. You can read up more about the process of the mission 
. See where this is going? Yup, we crashed the HPA. And not just a few broken balsa stringers, we crashed the crap out of it. Let me give you the gist of the flight test. The takeoff went pretty smoothly, and everyone cheered as the HPA lifted off into the air. Following that, the plane slowly rose to 300 ft, as our pilot manned the controls from the ground. It’s actually quite a sight to see the person with the controls following behind the aircraft in a car with the sunroof open. Anyways, after reaching 300 ft, the pilot began to attempt some turns. The first turn went off without a hitch, nice and smooth without any indication of what would happen less than a minute later. After successfully completing the turn, the HPA flew off into the sunrise a bit before the pilot attempted another turn. This again, worked out fairly well, but if one is paying close attention to the video, they can see a little downward movement in the left wing. Essentially what happened, or what is believed to have happened, is something failed in the left wing. However, even after that, it continued to fly for a bit longer. On the other hand, once the pilot attempted to descend, disaster struck. Essentially, in an aircraft, when you begin to descend, airspeed increases. With increased airspeed comes an increased load that the aircraft must withstand. It seems that once the HPA began to descend, and thus have an increased speed, the entire wing fails and looses its dihedral (slight angle of the wing, shown in the picture below). 
As soon as that happens, the right wing drops significantly, hits the ground, and the whole HPA sort of self-distructs on top of itself. It certainly was a sight to see, but the HPA is definitely in bad shape, if you can even call it a plane anymore. On a better note, we now get to construct a new HPA, which will certainly be more fun than flying another person’s design and work. Overall, the flight test was certainly informative, and if you have the time I highly suggest watching the video, shown below: