2000 Aerodesign West Competition, Sponsored by Lockheed Martin and the Antelope Valley Tailwinds R/C Club.

For those of you who haven't heard of the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Aerodesign competition, basically the task is to design, build and fly a model airplane that will lift the most weight given a set of design parameters. The contest is open to college and university students, and is held twice a year at different venues throughout the United States (and now Australia and Brazil I'm told).

Unfortunately, the University of Calgary doesn't offer (ANY) courses in Aerospace design - this is somewhat annoying for a airplane-nut such as myself. That hasn't stopped the UofC from entering teams in the competition, but does put us at a disadvantage. The competition regulations state that the aircraft must be "student-concieved, designed, and built", but seeing as how the average Aerolift team member has never even SEEN a model airplane before, guess how often the professors "helped out" with the airplane deisgn? This annoyed me to no end last year; my first year participating in the event.

I'm in my fourth year of studies at the University of Calgary, and as there was no team in my first year, I attended my first design competition last year. Although I'd hoped this wouldn't be the case, as a third-year (junior?) member of a fourth-year (senior?) deisgn team, a lot of opinions were either completely ignored, or treated with well-meaning condescension. It didn't matter that none of the seniors on the team had ever designed or flown a model, it just turned into a bit of a seniority contest at times. Such is the nature of teamwork, but it didn't make it any less annoying. There were eight of us on the team; five seniors and three juniors. Even with our odd differences of opinion, we all got along pretty well. Four of us made it down to California, and we brought one of the local power fliers with us:

The 2000 University of Calgary Aerolift Design Team
(Left to Right) Morley Gruler (pilot), Josh Arceneaux, Adam Till (dat'za me!), Jordan Grosse, Sarah Saleh

The rules for the "regular class" for this competition state that the aircraft must have a projected planform area of no more than 1200 sq", a cargo bay volume of 300 cu", and must use a K&B .61 plain-bearing motor for propulsion. The aircraft must lift-off within a 200 ft run, and make one complete circuit of the field before touching down within that same 200 ft distance.

Although each year the entry should be brand new or substantially changed from previous entries, the design we used for 2000 was basically the same as the previous team's aircraft. Athough it is supposedly an "evolution" of the same airplane that has been campaigned about five different times, to call it unique would be a laughable affront to the truth. Plus it's ugly, but don't take my word for it:

Behold the well-named AeroPig2000! I don't think I have ever hated an airplane quite as much as this one. The premise behind the design, dubbed OHS for Outboard Horizontal Stablizer, is to place the horizontal tails in the upwash vortices produced by the tips of the main wing, using them to generate lift. The design was pioneered by Dr. J.A.C. Kentfield here at the UofC, and this competition has traditionally provided a proving ground for his theory. With the tails doing some of the job that is typically borne by the wing alone, theoretically one can get 8-10% more lift from a given planform area. Sounds okay doesn't it?

The problem is, nobody other than Dr. Kentfield really understands this design! I've read all of his papers on the subject and studied the theory pretty closely, but I still can't really quantify any of my knowledge.

I don't yet have the background to get to the point where I can say that "If I increase this area by 2%, this will happen".  To my line of thinking, why would we choose a non-optimized, unconventional design when we could work towards a solid one based on proven ideas. There is always room for innovation and experimentation, but I think you have to start from a good foundation. But even though I campaigned pretty heavily for a more conventional design, Dr. Kentfield designed this airplane almost in it's entirity, and we were left to take an outline and make it into a fleshed-out model.

Although at first I participated rather heavily in the design process (again, I was the only one who'd ever done this kind of thing before), eventually I was slowly bumped to one side. The design reviews, where the graduate students and professors had a chance to question the team on their work, became comical to watch. There were more times then I can remember where, when the team was questioned about a design choice, the seniors would quickly back down when their ideas conflicted with the professors. It wasn't that the students ever had the wrong ideas, they just weren't the profs ideas. Here's a good example:

Example) In the interest of not having to cart around a 120" wing, I put forth the idea that we should just a carbon joiner rod and a two piece wing. I've done this one countless sailplanes, and winches put FAR more stress on an airframe than this airplane would ever see. The esteemed council of grads and profs didn't agree however, since "this would induce an unacceptable stress riser into the design", and more to the point, the UofC had always used a one-piece wing. The seniors quickly backed down on the issue (they did have grades riding on this to be fair), but seeing as how I knew that we weren't wrong, I ended up arguing with a five-person council by myself for twenty minutes until I was cut off. End result: one piece wing.

I think that I was basically too vocal about my opinions, but I don't see the harm in healthy debate. It annoyed me to no end that we students always backed down, and I slowly became disillusioned with the whole design process.  The only changes that were ever made, compared to the previous year, were to change the OHS airfoil slightly, reduce the aspect ratio on the horizontal tail, and to make the main wing foam-cored instead of built-up. Nothing earth-shattering there. Basically the only thing that I ever learned was that professors don't like being disagreed with.

But enough bitching, let's get down to buisness! Given the fact that this was a project that took place after school hours, final exams soon took over our lives. After exams were over with, the entire airplane was built in a marathon two-week session by the other members of the team (I had to work during the summer). The only day I was able to get off was the day before we were scheduled to leave, but I took comfort in the fact that the other team members were pretty happy with their progress, and that we only needed to do a bit of "final assembly" before we left. That final assembly ended up being:

1) The entire fuselage - it was still just a balsa shell when I got there. It needed 'glassing, carbon-reinforcement, servo-, engine-, and landing gear installation, and a proper wing-saddle.
2) Most of the wiring in the airplane. Almost every servo had been wired together, with common grounds and power taps coming out of one single connector (they did have individual signal wires, whew). This might have worked, and I was almost going to leave it alone, but then it turned out that one elevator servo didn't work. Two and a half hours later...
3) The OHS booms. I'm serious - they weren't started yet. The tail surfaces themselves were done, but they were in no way associated with the rest of the airplane.

At least the wing only needed covering. So, as a small army of helpers decended on the building as reinforcements, about 9 of us put in a solid 16 hour, through-the-night building session, and got the airplane as close to finished as it was going to get before we had to be on the road (yes, we drove). It turned out well enough as can be expected given the time frame, but we would still be  working on the airplane in the motel room in California the night before the competition.

On to California!