This competition highlights the state of the art skill in designing the airframe of flying models. The aim is to build awareness on how complex the structural of the magnificent flying machine that fly us from one place to another, as well as to increase the curiosity and interest on why it is build in such a way. The model has to be in ‘skeleton’ mode and it can be a helicopter, commercial aircraft, fighter jet and etc. The model must be made before you come for the competition day at USM. You are not required to make them fly as your skeleton model will be displayed to public as static display. Check out below for some amazing pictures of flying model skeletons.
The picture below is the winner of our AEROFAIR 2012 in the Airframe Modeling category: SMK Tun Syed Sheh Barakbah, Sungai Bakap, Pulau Pinang with their beautiful replica of the Wright Brothers’ famous airplane.
The guidelines for this competition are given below:
- Materials: Any materials can be used to construct the models, either cheap materials or recycled materials.
- Dimension: The overall size of the model must not exceed 1 m.
- Judging criteria: Judging criteria will be based on originality, overall craftsmanship, creativity of the design and the overall quality of the constructions of the models. Judges decision is final.
To get started, you can look at the images of earlier airplanes to get some idea of what models you can build. To do this, use Google Images and enter the keywords “Early Airplanes” or “Early Helicopters”. You can choose to build any of the models that use a lot of skeletal frames.
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We should design our own model?
Participants (secondary school students) must build their own airframe models. You can choose a design based on existing airplanes. For example, the students from SMK Tun Syed Sheh Barakbah build their model as in the picture above based on the Wright Brother's design. You are free to choose any other design that you like. We gave the examples above of 4 different categories: helicopter, air baloon, fighter aircrafts, and the Wright Brother's model.
If students prefer to design their own airplane models rather than using the existing designs, they can do that also. We the AEROFAIR committee will accept that as well. But to be safe, the new designs should not be too far different from existing designs. Otherwise, students have to explain and justify how their designs can still be categorized as airplanes, or other types of flying vehicles.