Design Process

Printout of your Aery design.

Descriptions of how you modified your design during the build process (did you sand the wood to make an airfoil? What thickness of wood did you use? Etc.)

  • I used the standard thickness of the wood provided, I had sanded an aerofoil on to all parts, the most extreme aerofoil was on the vertical stabilizer, and the one on the wing was more mild. I am starting to think that that might have been a mistake

Flight observations: How did your plane perform? Be detailed and use proper verbage.

  • The first model of the plane preformed realy realy well, except for the fact that the wings kept falling off… So I redesigned it some more after that.

How did you further modify your plane? (realigned the vertical stabilizer, sanded the right wing to balance, etc.) Was the glider as stable as you expected? Why or why not might this be so? What techniques did you use to “trim” the glider for straight and gently descending flight? How many test flights were required to get the glider trimmed for long distance, straight-line flight? Was this expected? Why or why not?Be detailed on what you did and the desired outcome.

  • After the wings kept snapping off, I decided to change my wing design, I made them out of a single peice of wood (thus increasing both structural integrity and glue surface.) I also made it from a wider piece of wood (to make up for the fact that I had to make the wings shorter then they were in the original design so that I could conserve lifting surface)

How did it fly after modifications? More observations.

  • It flew ok, but it had this tendancy to yaw uncontrollably, I originaly thought that might be because I had miscalibrated te vertical stabilizer. Upon further regluings I realised that it was not the issue…

How did you further modify your plane? (realigned the vertical stabilizer, sanded the right wing to balance, etc.) Was the glider as stable as you expected? Why or why not might this be so? What techniques did you use to “trim” the glider for straight and gently descending flight? How many test flights were required to get the glider trimmed for long distance, straight-line flight? Was this expected? Why or why not?Be detailed on what you did and the desired outcome. many times as needed.

  • I realised that the problem might be the size of the stabilizer because the yaw might have been produced by a aesymetricly sanded aerofoil or the inconsistent density of the balsa wood. The way to fix this I thought was to increase the size of the vertical stabilizer, making sure to glue it on straight.

Explanations for how you went about making it fly – Be specific – Summarize concepts of glider stability and how the modification will address the issue (Center of gravity, center of lift, pitch, yaw, roll, lateral stability) I am going to change __________ because _______________. Did you think about difficulties in construction?

  • The principles of flight have always guided my design, both in the development process and how I have changed my plane to suit my needs, Including my final changes, mostly in the process of finding a way to balance the plane so that it would fly sucessfuly. (Mostly through adding mass in the nose.)

Final distance flown. Observations about your competition flights.

  • The glider flew decently far the first time ending in about 30 feet, however on further practice of the throwing technique I was able to get the final distance up to about

Reflection Questions

If your grade were solely dependent on the distance flown, how would you change your design?

  • If possible I would add a firing mechanism that could use rubber bands, because the more energy you can put into the flight it seems it preforms exponentialy better.

After discussing the results (Aery flight number vs. distance) what conclusions can you make about the software? Is it accurate? Is you building ability more important than the design?

  • Aery32 isnt a terrible program. I dont trust the aery flight number that much. Expecialy because it is easy to make planes in there that just mess with the aery evaluations. I also find the fact that it cant take into account other variables (aerofoils and the angle of your wings). To be considerable drawbacks, also conserning is that you cant export a 3d model of your plane. I cant realy speak to the sucess of the Aery32 algorithm, because even though my first plane got a score of 200. I had to change it to ease development pressures.

After the competition, what did you notice about the different designs and results? Did bigger gliders go farther? Did smaller? Did traditional designs perform better than experimental?

  • The biggest thing that suprised me, is that how well you throw a glider has a big big say in how far that glider travels. My gliders flight distance doubled once I improved my throwing technique.