With apologies to the great Yogi (Berra, not Bear), Sunday's go-for-broke flight did exactly that under pretty blustery conditions. Our Miners spent a late night repairing the plane and did the job so well that you'd never know the wing was something of a pretzel after Saturday's wreck. They reattached and reinforced the rear bulkhead previously ripped from the fuselage, loaded nearly all of the craft's design payload, double-checked the engines and planned strategy with pilot Kelly O'Connor.
The payload adjustments seemed to have done the trick because the craft built much-needed speed and Kelly began to lift Whalicus skyward (a big improvement over Saturday's flight), but just as a flight official raised his green flag to signal a legal lift-off, things went wrong; REALLY wrong. In just a blink of an eye the impact-weakened tail boom began to separate from the fuselage with the obvious loss of control, and it was all over.
The craft plowed sideways into the ground, throwing grass and (yes!) divots of turf across the runway before skidding to a halt.
We'll just let you suffer through the sequence..........
You'd never know it took about half a second to do all this......
And this..........
And finally, aside from the groans rising from the crowd, all was quiet.
Oft times when disaster strikes, there is something to be learned, a silver lining, as they say.
One thing that the students could brag about was the overall robustness of their design and construction. Much of the plane remained intact, as it simply broke into two pieces making recovery a relatively simple process. If you want to see what it COULD have looked like, read on..............
I imagine it took awhile for these folks to return the grass runway to its original condition......
Lastly, with innovation comes risk. Check out the brief life span of this canard design.
(believe it or not, this aircraft is actually head UP!)
Not anymore...........
This must be the rapid-stop model. Ya think maybe some aircraft were plagued by center-of-gravity miscalculations?
After all that, all the teams were genuinely rooting for each other and really felt bad for those who wrecked, because they all know the hard work and dedication that goes into these projects. We post these images because as someone said, no one wants to see a crash happen, but if there IS going to be a disaster, no one wants to miss it.
I guess that is what separates us from the folks at the Texas Motor Speedway....................
