Indoor Flight Competition

Introduction
Indoor Flight is a category of light-weight indoor planes powered by rubber bands and flown without any remote controls. The aim of building one of these planes is to maximize its flight time, with flight times ranging from 1 to 5 minutes for beginners, and achieving more than 40 minutes in international competitions. These planes are built from cheap and light materials, normally balsa woods and thin plastic films. The rubber band is used to rotate the propeller to thrust the plane forward and upward. Once the band looses its power, the plane begins to descend. To maximize the flight time within a confined area, the plane is typically designed to fly in circles.

Check out below for some videos of their graceful flights.

1. Japanese Indoor Aero Club
2. Double Whammy Indoor Flight
3. Japanese Indoor Flight and Flapping Wing
4. Indoor Flight Competition in a US School
5. F1D Aeromodelismo Indoor Flight

These websites below explain how to design and build an indoor flight:

1. Science Olympiad Wright Stuff Event Construction Tips
2. The Double Whammy Construction Article
3. The Penny Plane Construction Article
4. Build a Balsa Wood Rubber Band Model Airplane
5. How to Build a Rubber Powered Model Airplane
6. How to Make a Rubber Band Plane in 6 minutes

You can learn more about indoor flight in general by searching for the term “Indoor Flight F1D”, or start reading about it from the Freeflight.org website.

Workshop
We will conduct a half-day workshop for the Indoor Flight competition on Saturday, 23 August 2014, a month before the competition. More details can be read in the Program Schedule page. Free breakfast and lunch will be provided for all participants.

During the workshop, students will learn about the basic science of flight and the basic concepts of designing an indoor plane. We will demonstrate the actual process of building an indoor plane and students will get to do hands-on activities to build some parts of their planes during the workshop. Each school will be given all the materials needed (for free) so they can design and build a few of their own planes at their schools before the competition.

Competition
The indoor flight competition will be conducted on the morning of Saturday, 27/9/2014, in the Pusat Pembangunan Siswa (PUMA), USM Engineering Campus, with a space of 24m x 20m x 8m (average height). There is only one criteria to win this indoor flight competition: longest flight time, counted from the beginning of the flight until the plane touches the ground. Each team can enter any number of indoor planes into the competition, but can have a maximum of 3 flight trials using any planes they have to get the best flight time. (But the number of trials may be reduced depending on the number of entries for this competition).

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