Science Olympiad – WRIGHT STUFF & FLIGHT

https://www.soinc.org/flight-b

https://www.soinc.org/flight-c

Prior to the tournament, teams will construct, collect data on test flights, analyze and optimize a free flight rubber-powered aircraft to achieve maximum time aloft.

No Welcome to propeller propulsion this is an event that what we’re trying to do is see who can either build design or modify a kit for an airplane to fly indoors in a confined airspace uh the highest efficiency in other words the longest flight wins and the idea is

Demonstrate um develop uh research all the techniques that are involved in having an airplane fly indoors again for the longest period of time I showed you in the rule book where you had two minutes and what basically the rules are uh 12in minimum wingspan 12in minimum fuselage length uh 6in prop plastic

Propeller uh has to be a a production in other words it’s in production uh you can buy at a hobby shop or buy through mail order it case may be and it has to weigh between 10 gram and 28 gram oh yes one more thing’s a 12in loop of rubber

Any size but it’s got to be a 12inch loop how are the kids doing this year pretty good for a first time and total novice event we’re surprised to see flights that have gone up as so far as high as 30 seconds lightest airplanes will win the closer you can come to 10

Grams is much better to trim the airplane to fly in a circle and uh the other is is energy management uh the propeller should turn the whole time it’s not like flying Outdoors we have a thermal to keep the airplane aoft after the power runs out indoors it has to be

Underpowered the whole time so the best thing to do is have that prop either pitched or moved such that it slows the prop down so it goes for the whole minute or whatever here’s a sample that the most important thing it doesn’t have is dihedral the V section where the wing

Joins that’s for stabilization if it had a v if it if it fell off on One Wing this Wing would have more lift than this Wing so it’ want to correct itself you can have polyhedral tips we can find this is polyhedral tips okay two dihedrals on One Wing okay much more

Stable than a flat Wing like this the other is this is not only a solid material but this is Basswood this is one of the heaviest this is a hardwood okay very difficult to make something like this stay airborne because of the weight it’s this is essentially overweight high Wing loading airplane

And the wing loading is a relationship of the the wing area compared to the total weight of the airplane and the higher that number is that ratio is the least efficient it becomes here’s a sample of a of an airplane and this is actually a kit from Midwest products that it’s very

Lightweight to begin with but they’ve elected the tissue cover which is a lighter covering notice it has a v dihedral on it okay and overall the pylon the wing is higher than the rest of the fuselage the wing is now away from the prop wash itself drifting underneath the underneath the wing okay

This is an offici airplane I would suspect this would do over 30 seconds here’s another sample of an Allwood airplane again we’ve got a problem here he’s got a a lot of wing area or he she whoever it may be has a lot of wing area okay but there’s

Relatively no dihedral and A good rule of thumb is however long the wing is the Fus fuselage should be approximately the same length so really four and a half uh this is going to be an unstable airplane okay um this has been um substantially modified these folks um learned how to

Take weight off the airplane they actually took Material off the bottom of the fuse slash here they covered the whole airplane with tissue uh you know like a shoe box tissue of some sort much lighter weight and uh it looks like they balanced their prop if you balance your

Prop that it improves the efficiency of the whole design the other thing is lubricate the rubber band armor is a good choice if you do that you can increase the efficiency of the rubber band by maybe U 70% this is a modified uh uh wingless wingless wonder I believe it’s called um

Uh basically there’s there’s still a fuselage it has uh it’s a it’s a somewhat of an all-wing design with plenty of dihedral or polyhedral in this case okay the only the only problem that I see with this airplane is the wood is far too heavy for the wing area itself

Um this should be constructed out of no more than one 1/8 square or even 116th Square uh again uh the airplane overall is just going to be overweight and I would suspect a good flight time because see all the rubber band that they have to use all this represents extra baggage

Any extra baggage we can take off the airframe makes it much more efficient I would suspect U 15 seconds from this airplane here here’s another one that’s been covered with a a tissue and apparently doped um I don’t recommend doping an airplane uh especially for indoor

Because when it dries it tends to warp the surfaces okay it’s unnecessary to dope an airplane I wouldn’t I wouldn’t recommend it any any predictions off the top of my head um might be that airplane there or um one of these down one mostly this one

Is capable any them that you see with framework and tissue covering certainly are going to be in the in the top ranking as a trial event at the national competition 1997 was a learning year flights were of a wide variety and quality however what the competition lacked in experience it made up in

Enthusiasm rules for this highflying event are many but easy to understand airplanes must be impounded prior to the competition for inspection of event specifications airplanes can be constructed only from wood paper and glue clay may be used for trimming and ballast nonwood or paper accessories permitted include land gear systems

Rubber motor attachment points tape used to attach control surfaces and plastic cockpit winds screens the propeller for the model shall be a single blade plastic propeller 5 in to 6 and2 in in length number one yeah it was a pure accident I had the dihedral up way about

Here then went I took it off it just I let it dry the rest of the way and it sort of just came right down work this is one of my personal airplanes I’m a member of the Academy of model erotics and the National Free Flight uh Society we all fly model

Airplanes by the way let’s let’s cure a misnomer here this is not a model airplane this is a Miniature Aircraft model airplanes are something we put on our bookshelves all these fall under the exact same principles as full scale aircraft to it in this case this is

Called a Bostonian this is an event with the AMA uh basically it’s an airplane a fictitious full scale airplane it never was and it’s designed to fly indoors it also happens that it it does follow the same uh rules for our propeller propulsion flight so we figured uh why

Not give an Rog flight which is Rise off ground and have you have a chance to see an airplane fly the flight area will be designated by the event director and and all flights must begin from any location within this area in launching the airplane the student may not move more

Than 1 meter from the starting point participants will be given 5 minutes to make up to a maximum of two propeller airplane flights the rubber motor may be wound prior to the beginning of the 5-minute period while the proceeding team is competing the first team of the day will

Be given two minutes to pre-windows M the event director will measure and record the time Aloft in seconds rounded off to the nearest tth timing will stop when the airplane hits the floor or is resting in or on an object ricocheting off walls or obstacles does not stop the

Time participants will be allowed to make adjustments to the airplane but time for these adjustments will be part of the 5minute flight period The Oh whenever you want to launch and what it’s about is experimentally understanding aerodynamics and being able to demonstrate your knowledge inside of the facility that contained airspace all these uh students have designed modified certainly built their own airplanes they’re Rubber powerered and what they’re attempting to do has had the

Most efficient longest time aoft things that that are most important are weight management and power management um certainly looking at aerodynamics understanding what causes an airplane to lift but understanding that that the relationship of What’s the wing loading um the weight of the airplane compared to how much Wing area

It has is very important for somebody if they want to achieve a higher time it would be important that the that if you have a wingspan of so many inches that your fuselage would be relative close to the same the other thing most important thing is that hedral if you’re going

Have dihedral the airplane doesn’t stay stable okay and the roll axis so uh I don’t have high hopes for this airplane back here is a Bostonian style airplane it’s a an AMA event just doesn’t have its wheels on it actually is um it’s it’s a heavier higher Wing loading

Airplane it too won’t have the capability of St flying 2 minutes as some of the other ones that we see down here now if we move down here these generally have lighter structures this is a these two are good examples of airplanes with with lightwing loadings they have some kind of dihedral this

Happens to be tip dihedral and if you look at the wingspan here and the fuse large length they’re they’re relevant to each other okay again that’s that’s important we’re trying to have a lightwing loading that’s the ratio of the weight to the to the to the um area

For the wing okay and if we look at this guy here uh this is an unfortunate sample of somebody you probably didn’t read the rules it’s got a very high Wing loading obviously it’s broken because it’s too heavy and Newtonian physics tells if if something is in motion then it’s going

To stay in motion so this had an abrupt stop someplace and all those heavy components they just want to release all their energy and apparently they did right about here uh in here we actually have a couple of kit airplanes and and as a recommendation kids are a great

Place to start to train for this event if you if you’re a total novice uh kits are available but they won’t be competitive out of the box they really have to be modified and re-engineered and that was one of the intentions of this event was to force these kids to

Investigate how to improve a stock design or what what is a a currently good flying airplane how do you make it Fly better okay so actually these folks although they brought a stock airplane they’re in the midst of of figuring out how to do it better and they’ve gone

Through a real learning curve here today and I imagine if they come next year they’re going to have totally different airplanes these are all a random selection of of airplanes that um well this is a kid airplane it’s been modified this obviously has been modified severely to high dihedral this

Is an airplane again has a relatively light Wing loading it’s got light relatively light structure they even had to brace the structure because they got it too light too too fragile um if we look down here you notice all these props um they’re all about the same size

They’re right around six six and 12 Ines that seems to be the standard accepted you know what people can can find again we have some Bostonian samples here that although they didn’t lighten up the airframes like these are solid wood that’s solid wood that’s a real heavy

Way to build an airplane you need to have a framework with a lot of tissue cover When you’re building in flying an airplane one of the procedures that must go through is understanding how to change the performance at a given flying site they’ve got to be flexible and the good way to doing that is to document your flights um you make one adjustment

Get one change fly the airplane you document where it flew how tight a circle it flew in things like that so that when you go to a flying you’ve never been to before and you got to fly competitively you can refer I mean it’s what a scientist would do refer to their

Documentation to figure out how to make the adjustments that are appropriate now last year we only had um 10 entrance now we have 54 so just by virtue of how many airplanes are here uh we see a vast Improvement and of course a lot of people have been doing a lot of research

And asking a lot of questions and apparently getting the answers [Applause] Almost uh it’s a ribbon if you drop it between 35 and 45 between 30 and 45 seconds sorry you get a 20 uh second bonus on top of your time I think it’s better for the kids with the the planes that aren’t going to fly the seven minute National

Winning plane to be competitive in their field like we’re flying about four and a half five minutes so if we get a fivem minute flight that puts us within 420 it’s it’s already a third of a a third of a minute which is huge at this level

Of competition so it’s just and it’s a great way to be creative the hardest way to do it most like is the best way to do It we made a prop gauge where we’d have the prop setting this thing and we would melt it so we can change it at the pitch of the prop so like you can have it so it can spin really fast in the air or we

Can have it push the thing like this um we did a bunch of tests with it and figured out that this is the best one to do it and we have the prop cage set up so we can just keep putting on new props and keep vending them up and it’ll be

The same thing so it just takes off one more variable and Plane guys amazing best we’ve done so far basic could have been a little higher but oh well thank you much and basically when you pull it back it measures the torque Tor and how is the torque me um actually it has to do with the number of

Turns you have on the motor so it increases with more turns you refer to the River Band as the motor it’s a rubber band motored can you demonstrate how that works yeah um you just turn it and the torque starts to increase I see that that shows you the torque so

You don’t turn according to number of turns um we record both yeah because um for our rubber Motors we use different thicknesses so basically on um thicker Motors you get fewer number of turns but higher torque and then for thinner Motors you get more turns but less

Torque so it’s a trade-off I think we’re uh into the ninth year basically the kids went from uh building toy airplanes to Scientific airplanes in those nine years and and we kind of monitored that with the change in our rules we we let out a little more opportunity for more

Science every year and we’re we’re right on track for what would be a say a 12 or 13e cycle in the event there’s other things that we could do in the future but we’re we’re getting Optimum out of the event for all these kids as it is

Now can measure the width of the wing and then the cord got it all right then we check the size of the stab make sure it’s legal here again it’s got a certain Dimension that they have to meet and then we check the size of the propeller turn around so you can

See okay that’s what they have to meet then the next step we have to do is weigh into rubber bands guys got have your rubber bands please supposed to weigh a minimum of two gr maximum of two grams this happens to be 1.3 grams which is adequate and number

Two comes in at 1.1 G so everything is fine with your airplanes they right they qualifying your rubber bands are good let me set you up over at a table and the flight judges will be with you shortly so you pick up your airplanes okay we did have uh a change in allowing

Film it’s a clear film that’s very thin uh it reduced a lot of the warps that would happen in transit and so forth so the airplanes are stable in the fact that their their uh air surfaces their flying surfaces don’t don’t move too much and because that it’s a lot easier

For these kids to track uh scientifically we’re using a log book and all those parameters that we request in that log book help these kids track um their their progress in an efficient manner and that’s how and that is what we’re seeing very efficient airplanes based on That This is new for our school we haven’t done film yet before we used to do tissue yeah it used to be tissue paper so we’ve had some difficulties getting into work because we don’t really have a specialty for this event but it it tends to break when it falls we’re learn to

Deal with it so okay how long did it stay up that time uh that was 138 and we didn’t do as many wies usually you should get around 140 oh wonderful thank you what’s special about your plane oh I don’t know um that I made it all from scratch using only the most

Fundamental materials that is I cut all these pieces originally from Big sheets of wood so I would have to strip them into long pieces and then cut them down to the right sizes and also this uh micro this uh micro plastic covering is pretty neat it’s Ultra lightweight and it’s pretty durable too

Well if you add in all the hours that I spent learning how to make these planes probably hundreds of hours but in terms of making the actual plane maybe 20 hours or work now it’s ready to testy basically we have a wingspan we have a wing cord that’s from the Leading

Edge to the trailing Edge we have a measurement there we have a measurement on the stabilizer which is the horizontal tail plane and the diameter of the propeller now those change a little bit every year that helps induce new airplanes every year uh but the overall scope of the event hasn’t really

Changed dramatically since its Inception word of the stab is okay check your propeller and this airplane passes the High School Division was allowed to have as an option a bip plane this year now bipe are tremendously efficient in low ceilings it’s interesting to see how

Well they’re going to do here in a high ceiling facility where you need to have less drag and higher penetration you got to get it up in the upper level of this facility where the warm buoyant air is and we just don’t know how it’s going to

Shake out we just haven’t seen enough Banes fly officially yet how are they getting the propellers to slow down or is there a way to make that slow down yeah there is there there are a couple ways one way is to change the pitch of the propeller how aggressive it’s like a

Think of it as a screw a coarse thread screw that’s a high a high pitch propeller that will slow down the propeller a lot the width of the rubber you can have thinner rubber that slows the propeller down and of course how the airplane is trimmed to fly slightly nose

High uh it’s a little more draggy that way but what that does is definitely slows the airplane down next year uh we’re not going to see dramatic changes in Right Stuff uh the only changes we may see is the fact that whether or not right stuff is in both divisions there’s

A good chance it’ll only be in either B or C and uh we do have some changes nothing major for next year and this is kind of a a a a second year cycle coming up and we introduced big things in the first year and they go through two years

To kind of change their their uh their plan and their airplane and then theoretically in a third year that would be the beginning of the next second year then we’d have more dramatic change in the parameters there’s a lot of gratification in that for years as a as

A hobbyist who flies indoor aircraft uh we’ve seen a decline um in people coming into the into the sport uh probably 10 years ago we definitely saw it was mostly people over the age of 55 who were flying indoor aircraft um I an excellent example of what this has

Done is in the last three years when they have the international competition for rubber powerered indoor airplanes uh we have won the last two years in the junior competition and all of those those players those those team members have all been Veterans of Science Olympia so on an international basis Science

Olympiad has brought America back into international flight [Applause] Sh