Planes take flight in Engineering Building A
25 Oct 2022
Watch our Aerospace students fabricate and flight test their aircrafts on the Spanish steps
As part of an icebreaker for the Aerospace Group Design Project, 4th year MEng Aerospace and MSc Aerospace students took to the Spanish steps in Engineering Building to launch an aircraft. This activity was a crowd sourced experiment on aircraft flight physics and required every student to fabricate and flight test their own ultra-simple aircraft using a toolkit and materials provided.
Students are challenged to turn raw materials into a flightworthy aircraft in under one hour. For this reason the aircraft are designed to be as simple as possible while still retaining the same flight physics principles of any large-scale piloted aircraft.
Students work within groups to support and guide each other during the aircraft fabrication. The goal is for all the aircraft within a group to present identical flight characteristics. Groups with good communication and sharing of ideas tend to produce near-identical aircraft with similar characteristics and so success is very much dependant on effective team work.
It is hoped that we can develop this type of practical engineering activity as part of the outreach work with visiting school children.