Indoor Flight Workshop

Update 22/9/2014: We have uploaded the tutorial video on how to make an Indoor Plane in Youtube.

The AEROFAIR USM 2014 committee has recently completed our Indoor Flight Workshop on last Saturday (23/8/2014). The workshop was a success with full attendance and participation from 19 teams from secondary schools in Pulau Pinang. We would like to express our sincerest appreciation and gratitude to all the participants – 75 students and 19 teachers – for coming to USM and participating in our first workshop ever on Indoor Flight. We will hand out the Certificate of Participation both for the workshop and for the competition during the Award Ceremony on the Competition Day, 27/9/2014.

The workshop started with the theory session at 9 am by Dr. Zulfaa, with a break for a group photo and breakfast at 10.30 am. The practical session was conducted afterward at 11 am by Sdr. Haniff and ended at 1.30 pm followed by lunch. Even though the practical session was planned to end much earlier at 1 pm, a lot of participants decided to stay longer even until 2 pm to ask questions and examined and took pictures of our indoor plane models.

We had a lot of people helping us out facilitating the learning session in this workshop: Dr. Fazreena, Zihad, and Siew Peng Mun, plus a few other students. We also had a lot of administrative and technical help in ensuring smooth registration process and in providing a good workshop environment. Thanks to all of you!

We would like to thank all participants for filling out the survey forms we handed out at the end of the practical session. All the feedback have been invaluable to us. We the committee learned a few things from the survey. We learned that almost all participants found the workshop exciting and useful where they got to learn new things related to science and aerospace engineering. They especially enjoyed the practical session where they got to apply the knowledge they learned to build the planes. We also learned that we need to improve the workshop in the future by making the practical session longer to give ample time for students to actually finish building their planes and test-fly them at the end of the session.

As promised, we have uploaded 2 documents from the workshop:

1. the Presentation Slides for the theory and practical sessions.
2. the Indoor Plane Construction Manual.

In addition to the documents above, please refer to The Famous Whammy Series guide from the National Free Flight Society which contains 2 indoor plane designs:

1. The Double Whammy is for the beginner’s level with a flight time of 1-2 minutes, and was the design that Haniff flew before the start of the practical session in the workshop.
2. The Penny Plane is a more advanced design with cambered (or curved) airfoil with a flight time of more than 5 minutes.

For detailed guides on building an indoor plane and a few other construction tips, you can read the Science Olympiad Wright Stuff Event Construction Tips. This article contains explanations on setting up the plane’s center of gravity, the wing dihedral, the plane’s circular flight, the propeller and the rubber-band motor. The plane design shown in this article is exactly the same design we used in the workshop to demonstrate the techniques to construct an indoor plane. But be warned that this design is too simple and doesn’t have a good flight time (less than 1 minute). Our advice is for you to use a better design to build your plane, such as the Penny Plane design.

Also, don’t forget to visit back our Indoor Flight Competition page that contains videos and other websites to help you further in building your own indoor planes.

Finally, we have a few photos here to share including the group photo. You can click on each picture to get the larger version of the photos.

(klik di sini untuk membaca teks di dalam Bahasa Malaysia)