After the first flying day S&T's Advanced Aero Vehicle Group has a firm grip on 3rd place, with a half day of flying still to come. Mike Crance files this report from SAE East at Marietta, Georgia:
Today it was bitterly cold out (45¿¿ yeah, pathetic, but everyone seemed to have planned for 70-80¿¿-ish days) in the morning during setup and the first rounds of micro and regular class, but it was warming up by the time open class started flying. Out of nine teams in the open class, only five had flown their airplanes successfully by the end of the day and one of those crashed on approach in the mid-afternoon. Another open class team attempted a flight but their wings folded up very shortly after takeoff. Missouri S&T flew four times and had three successful flights today out of five--the unsuccessful flight was a DQ because the plane didn't lift off in the required 200 ft. AAVG had another chance to fly today, but was unable to because of a problem with the engine mount becoming loose due to the bolts pulling out of the wood. Luckily, the team discovered the issue during the afternoon engine tuning session and the engine did not fall off in flight. Most of the team's day seemed to be spent playing with the payload to move the center of gravity around the airplane and watching the multitude of micro and regular class planes fly while waiting intently for one of them to fall out of the sky.
Speaking of crashes, some of the more notable were an airplane that went into a vertical climb immediately after taking off, stalling and then falling back to earth; a flying wing design that ended up 30 feet from the ground that necessitated help from the local fire department to recover (probably the most interesting cat they had ever rescued from a tree); the open class plane that had its wings snap in on themselves and an airplane that lost a wing during flight.
At the end of day one and six rounds of flying, Sky Miner is ranked third overall behind the Brazilians of Escola de Eng de Sao Carlos USP, who will be untouchable with their forty pounds of payload, and Warsaw University of Technology. The team's spirits are high and we hope to be able to gain some ground in the standings tomorrow with the remaining two or three rounds of flights.
The competition is supposed to be webcast tomorrow at www.teamrcpilot.com/webcast.html or www.ustream.tv/teamrcpilot.
Reading between the lines of Mike's report, it looks like S&T's Sky Miner is the top-ranked U.S. open class team at the end of the day's flying.
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