Recently in AAVG Category

David Althuis files this report from their NASA-sponsored competition at Huntsville, Al this past weekend:

"Thursday some of the team presented our project at the Rocket Fair. It is a science-fair type display where all of the teams and a lot of NASA employees go around and check out all of the projects. In the afternoon, we went to the US Space and Rocket Center. That evening we had the pre-flight check with the range safety officer just to make sure that our rocket was safe for flight on Saturday.
On Friday NASA gave us a presentation on the Ares project and their progress. We traveled around the Marshall Space Flight Center to several stations including friction stir welding, test stands from over the years, one of the stations that over sees the Space Shuttle launches, and propulsion research labs. Friday evening we did most of the preparation work on the rocket getting it ready to fly first thing Saturday morning. Due to forecasted rain, we wanted to fly ASAP Saturday morning.
On Saturday we got up bright and early to be one of the first few rockets go fly. We had to wait for the second round to get a stand that was sturdy enough for our 45 lb rocket. When it finally came time, the winds calmed down and it for us and Aiolos flew strait as an arrow to 5,664 feet. The recovery system worked exactly as planned and landed a mere 500 feet from the pads. One of the altimeters reported 840 ft/sec. peak velocity and 19 seconds to apogee. Data was recorded from the strain gauges. It remains to be interpreted for stress calculations.
The USLI banquet took place under the massive, horizontally-laid-out Saturn V at the Space and Rocket Center. Our team took both of the awards voted on by our peers; the Best Looking Rocket and Team Spirit awards. The final scoring and placement awards will be announced some time after the post flight reviews are submitted".

Dave's reported altitude was nearly 1,000 ft higher than their early-April Kansas mark of 4,691 feet, and just 384 feet higher than their design altitude of 5,280 feet. Pretty good engineering, we'd say.

We'll post photos (hopefully) as soon as the team does laundry and catches up with their classes.

The intrepid flyers from the Miner AAVG team got back to Rolla last night richer and a lot happier than in years past. Sky Miner finished third behind Brazil and Poland in the overall open class (that's the big dogs of SAE Aero) competition and will be mailed the trophy and $500 prize money soon. S&T also earned third place in the 'total payload lofted' mini competition with just over 22 lbs carried (received a trophy for that) and placed second in design behind perennial power Brazil (received a trophy for that too). This strong showing has the Miners claiming "top U.S. team honors" at SAE East, a title they named themselves, but accurate none the less.
This marks a year of great recovery for the flyers, whose '07 and '08 birds struggled at competition. The students learned quite a lot from those misadventures, and applied the lessons learned in a new design that held up very well.

PR chief Mike Crance says "overall, it was a very successful event for AAVG as we had a strong showing in all aspects of the SAE Aero competition and we proved that we are the dominant American team once again. The team is in high spirits and learned quite a few things that could be implemented in a new plane and is fired up for an opportunity next year to show that after more than 100 years since Americans flew the first airplane, we still know how to get it done".

We haven't heard anything yet this morning from the Advanced Aero Vehicle Team and Sky Miner, their 2009 heavy lift aircaft. We are pretty sure our Miners are frantically trying to get in a few more flights because there is a huge cluster of rain and thunderstorms approaching the competition site.

Most teams gradually increase their payloads with each flight, hoping to snare more points. Late on the second flight day it is not uncommon for a team to fly its maximum design payload in a last-ditch attempt to take over first place. The old expression "go for broke" often applies because that's what happens to some aircraft; they break, sometimes in spectacular ways. Let's hope that doesn't happen to the Miners today.

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.

The AAVG team kicked off S&T's 2009 design competition season today at the SAE Aero East Competition at Marietta, Georgia. Chief Engineer Michael Mueller called to say that Sky Miner, the team's 2009 airplane design, (pardon the pun) flew through tech inspection by 10:00 a.m. this morning, the first open class plane to do so. The craft had 100% compliance with the judging rules, and only needed to cushion their battery pack to comply with local flying club requirements.

Mike reported that teams from all over the country are entered in the event, as well as teams from Poland, Canada, and the always impressive Brazilians. We haven't confirmed whether our friends from Venezuela are there, but we hope so. St Louis University is on hand and they always bring competitive birds to SAE Aero events. Our Miners compete in the Open Class, of which there are nine teams registered; not sure how many other teams are entered in the regular classes. Open Class is the big dogs of the airstrip, by the way.

Team spokesman Mike Crance sent us a end-of-day note that sounds very promising for the Miners who are working to recover from particularly hard landings (think crashes) in '07 and '08, and it sounds like there's plenty of room for optimism this year.

Mike says "we passed tech inspection early in the day which means that we are ok to fly tomorrow (Saturday). We also gave our technical presentation to the Lockheed-Martin panel of judges. Mike Mueller did a great job with the presentation and the team ended up with the second-ranked oral presentation score. We also discovered our design report was ranked 3rd, these two scores put us in second place overall behind the Brazilians".

He continues "we have already seen aircraft carnage today and there was no flying. The Open Class team that presented before us walked out of the room with their plane in pieces...some judging session. We also took a little field trip to the flying field today to check it out and do some testing of how the plane handles in grass--which is pretty much beautifully.

For tomorrow, we look forward to competing with a very strong Brazilian team and showing the world what Missouri S&T has".

Tomorrow evening we hope to report that the Miners have vaulted into the flying lead, and upset the skilled Brazilians. For a look at the team and plane, scroll down a few stories and see photos and stories from the test flight just two weeks ago.

P.S. You might be interested to know that the judges' criteria for a successful landing says that if no parts fall off by the time the airplane comes to a stop, you're good! Your pilot can pancake the bird in a crash landing and destroy the plane, but if all the myriad of pieces remain attached then you have a valid flight.

For the record, this unidentified team did not get credit for a successful landing last year.......

But if memory recalls, this one did.

Go figure!

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.

S&T's high-flying Advanced Aero Vehicle Group has long been known for flying large radio-controlled airplanes that carry a payload weight roughly equal to that of a large dog, and the team is already looking to kick off the design competition season early next March in California. The aircraft makers nearly alway do very well in SAE Aero events but once the plane flies it pretty much goes into retirement, leaving a bunch of budding aerospace engineers with a lot of time on their hands. About two years ago the team came up with the idea of getting into high-altitude rocketry, so they built and launched a magnificent 10-ft high rocket that hit nearly 20,00 feet and Mach 1.4, pretty darned good for a first launch (we'd bet that NASA and the Soviets would've loved to have a great inaugural flight back in the early days of the space race).

Anyway, the Miners found out that NASA sponsors the University Student Launch Initiative (USLI) at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL., an event that challenges students to design, build, and launch a reusable rocket that carries a scientific payload one statute mile above the launch pad, and it seemed like a perfect match.

Their '08 projectile, "Nikomedes" meaning "to think of victory", at nearly 7' long is not as big as the team's first model, but does have the challenge of carrying an instrumentation package that records much of the launch data for post-flight evaluation. This is not a show-up-and-fly event; student teams must submit proposals to NASA in the fall, and once chosen, design, build and test throughout the school year. The USLI requires a NASA review of the teams’ preliminary and critical designs, as well as flight readiness and safety reviews before the rocket and payload are approved for launch.
This colorful scratch-built bird carries three flight computers that record barometric pressure, altitude, acceleration, and GPS coordinates. Building the rocket is challenging, but test flights are pricey. The rocket "motors" are in reality packed with solid chemical propellant and can't be reused. Each motor costs anywhere from $300-400, and you can't just pick them up at the local hardware store (did we mention that teams have to raise much of their own operating funds that, uh, go up in smoke?).

Back to the competition, eleven university teams (many of them veteran groups) registered for this year's Huntsville competition and the Miners came out nearly on top, edged out only by Utah State and the University of North Dakota/Grand Forks. The Nikomedes group received two special recognitions, winning the competition’s “Outreach Award,” presented to the team that “best inspired the study of rocketry and other science, technology, engineering, and math topics in their community,” and the “Best Looking Rocket Award”.
S&T's first attempt at NASA rocketry work also includes judging on design reviews, website, safety, and flight success. NASA insiders told us that S&T did "incredibly well", better than many veteran teams and that they wouldn't have had any complaints at all if S&T had won, so we are thrilled that the Miners took third place. Certainly a lot better than the (un-named) school whose rocket sort of, uh, blew up. Event officials see growing interest in this event, and expect the launch-off to grow to fifteen or more teams next year.

This project engages students in scientific research and real-world engineering processes with NASA engineers, and exposes them to employment opportunities within the U.S space industry. The 34-member AAVG, divided among heavy lift aircraft, micro-class airplane and rocket projects is one of many student design teams at MS&T in which engineering students design and construct entries for various national competitions. The educational aspect of this particular enter is best summed up by Dr. Fathi Finaish, Professor and Associate Chair of Aerospace Engineering and one of the team advisors, who says "Our efforts are aimed at engaging and nurturing young students, and ultimately producing capable engineers who can be part the future workforce. We will continue to focus on engaging and preparing these students through these efforts in order to prepare them for the Nation’s vision of developing and flying the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) by 2014, and returning to the Moon by 2020".

Guess the Miners truly ARE great rocket scientists!

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..............

The admonition you see as you enter a golf course was oddly appropriate this morning as "Whalicus" plowed a furrow into the grass runway upon takeoff. The Miners may have taken their mining heritage a little too seriously today and burrowed through the turf when a rough spot caught a wing tip just as the craft was lifting off.

A rough way to go after coming into the Open Class flying events in first place. The team's second-place awards in both engineering and oral reports gave them the highest overall placement, but all is not lost.

After a long, painful walk back to the pit area the group had repaired much of damage by mid-afternoon, and all that remained was to carefully (?) haul the 11-ft aircraft to the 3rd floor hangar at Motel 6 and replace the wing's surface material.

They figure many of the other aircraft have pretty much maxed out their lifting capacity at levels well below what S&T's bird can handle, so the open class championship is still within their grasp. All they have to do is get airborne with the day's heaviest payload
Oh, yeah, one of the event officials did help the Miners replace the divots.....

Don't feel bad for the Miners. If you want to see what a few other teams have experienced, just continue below.

..

Now that St. Pat's and Spring Break are over, the first major '08 design team has emerged from S&T's own somewhat smaller-scale 'skunkworks'. AAVG's new flyer was christened "Whalicus" just two days ago, and lifted off just great on its first flight at the Cuba, Missouri airport. Good thing they built a complete extra wing because the landing was a little, uh, rough.

Fast forward to the Lockeed/Martin-hosted SAE Aero competition in Ft Worth. The new S&T-labeled bird sailed through tech inspection with but two minor, and easily corrected, glitches.

Now it is down to an early-morning trek to nearby Thunderbird Flying Field and the two-day flyoffs with ever and ever increasing payloads. While the weather looks perfect for flying, the 2008 event throws a new challenge at the team. They'll eschew the paved runway for a grass landing strip (and have designed the landing gear accordingly), so flying should be uneventful, but landing and take-offs should have a bit more drama.

Hang on to your seats, Miners,and stay tuned; it is going to be an interesting ride!