Trainer Plane Update

Each week we make so much progress. As you may have heard there have been several attempts at making our first plane fly. The first two was a result of a lack of thrust. The final was due to some design issues. We will continue the progress on the trainer plane but will start transitioning into the actual project designs this coming week.

While our first attempt at a plane did not fly due to thrust issues, it seems as though they haev been resolved. The 7.2 volt battery that was supplying the power was not sufficient and so we added another one in series for 14.4 volts. This took the thrust from ~2N to 14N! We were also able to do some testing on different props and those results should be posted soon. Also, we started endurance testing on the batteries to see how long they would last at full power. We tracked voltage and thrust as a function of time. This gave us great data and showed us that we can sustain good power for about 4:45 with the current configuration. The current 14.4V (2000mAh - Nimh) battery weighs ~1.2 lbs which is just under our limit of 1.5 lbs. It looks like this means we may not be able to utilize two motors. We will have to further evaluate this.

One of the major design issues we had was due to the empennage (tail) of the plane. The vertical portion of the tail was too wide as was the horizontal stabilizer. The new fuselage that was built yesterday (Friday) is much narrower. The vertical portion was also made taller to make the plane more stable. The bulk of the previous nose was also reduced in the new design. We were able to create a wiring tunnel through the nose to the electronics bay in the second edition so that the motor wires do not have to wrap around the bottom of the nose. The new design also includes landing gear that may give us a beter look at the plane handling without leaving the ground.

A second generation wing needs to be made and the electronics installed before the test flight. The flight test should take place at Prado next weekend. We will let an experienced pilot attempt to fly the plane and give us feedback on our design.