Advanced Aero Vehicle Group Sends Two Aircraft Skyward

Morale on the dual-purpose AAVG team is flying as high as its two aircraft. Within the past two weeks the rocket-scientists-in-training recovered their biggest rocket yet near Pittsburg, KS, and while its tempting to say they launched in Rolla and it impacted in Kansas, that's probably not the case. Our guess is they chose a remote, desolate launch location with little appeal to humans (but with lots of gorillas, we hear) for safety purposes. The missile, christened Aiolos (A-O-los), blasted skyward to 4,691 feet on a solid-fuel motor similar to the boosters that help the space shuttle off the ground. These one-time-use motors produce an average thrust of 252 pounds and cost the team about $250 each time they light one up, so test launches are very infrequent. The crew will complete the paint job and instrumentation mounts for next month's NASA-sponsored launch competition. Each of nearly twenty college teams must fire missiles that will carry payload instruments that measure altitude, acceleration and other launch data.

Closer to home, and just a day before the campus emergency mass-evacuation exercise known as spring break, the heavy-lift vehicle portion of the AAVG headed to the Vichy Airfield to test its cargo-carrying airplane, or heavy-lift vehicle. Competiton rules say that the '09 maximum flight weight is fifty five pounds. This lightweight plane, dubbed SkyMiner, is expected to be trimmed to eighteen pounds empty weight by competition date leaving a possible payload weight of thirty seven, just over twice the weight as the bird itself. The Aero Miners opted to recycle an older motor (to save $$) with the same total displacement as a pair of last year's power plants. An inaugural flight means lot of testing, double checking, and nail-biting, because with only two weeks to go before competition a serious flaw or crash would mean a lot of students would kiss their spring break plans goodbye and stay in the shop to repair the plane.
Prior to flight the team had to measure critical wind direction, speed, and barometric pressure to ensure proper lift-off, and given the team's recent fund-raising challenges the students used the most sophisticated instrument available; one
student would lick his thumb, hold it skyward to obtain precise meteorlogical data, and then yell "take off THAT way!".
Once that information was duly noted in the flight computer the team attempted a few practice taxi runs to verify this "rule of thumb". Fortunately while some last-minute adjustments were dialed into the wings the wind abated and it was time to launch. Despite carrying a 20-lb test payload the plane rolled forward and virtually jumped off the ground en route to a flawless flight. With Kyle Zimmer at the radio controls the plane flew two beautiful laps around the field before gently touching down in front of a very relieved group of engineers. Chief Engineer Michael Mueller summed it up best when he said "...we are required to use a grass runway this year. That said, the test flight, even though it took place on asphalt, validated our take-off performance model. By changing the values of key variables, the model calculated a take-off distance value that was within 2 feet of the actual distance. This is important because it more or less proves that we can take-off within the required distance at max gross weight".

Following a post-flight analysis that lasted maybe fifteen seconds, the crew stuffed the plane and the support equipment back in the vehicles, raced back to campus and hit the road for spring break, confident in their design work. Then it's on to Atlanta in just two weeks for the SAE Aero East Competition.