One of the main event in Aerofair 2014 was the Indoor Flight Competition. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time such a competition was held in Malaysia. We had 18 teams participated in this event. What makes the Indoor Flight activity unique in Aerofair 2014 was that it was the first time we organized it. Also, it was more challenging than the other two competitions (the Airframe Modeling and the Water Rocket) in the aspect of the learning required. We had to conduct a special workshop for the Indoor Flight participants prior to the competition to teach science and engineering: the science part was teaching the theory of aerodynamic and flight science; the engineering part was teaching the basic design of airplanes and the techniques of building an indoor plane. For the other two competitions, the participants could build their own flight models using learning resources on the internet without requiring additional workshops from us.
An indoor plane is a very light-weight plane powered using a rubber-band. It is made of balsa woods to build the frames, and plastic coverings to make up the wing and tail surfaces. The weight of a plane ranges from about 1 to 10 grams. The flying speed typically is very slow, and can be made even slower than a person’s walking speed especially for lighter planes with large wing areas. The normal flight times can range from 1 to 5 minutes if built by amateurs using simple designs to more than 40 minutes if built by experts competing at the world level. World records have been reported to be more than one hour! There are tons of resources and videos about indoor flight that can be found on the internet. A special documentary has also been done to film this science and art of flying at floatdocumentary.com. From these videos at the world-class competitions, you can see that it is an amazing feeling to be able to build an excellent indoor plane that seems to float endlessly in air.
One great aspect of bringing indoor flight into the secondary-level science activities is that it packs a lot of benefits for the students and the schools at an extremely cheap cost. First, on the science aspect, you can learn a great deal about the basic principles on the science of flight and on how an airplane is designed from learning about indoor flight. Second, and quite as important as well, students get to learn and apply the science through hands-on activities, while working in teams, by constructing the planes. This process will surely be more exciting if these planes are to be flown in competitions.
There is a difference between learning the theories and applying them directly. This is a lesson we want to embed in the workshop as well. In theory, everything seems to connect perfectly, and it gives you the feeling that whatever you build will definitely fly perfectly. But when you actually try to build one, you will see that there’s a lot of challenges to make your plane flies well. The main problem in the process of building one is that not everything you build can be matched perfectly with what you have calculated and designed in theory. Sometimes the weight is a bit heavier from what you have designed, or the plane’s center of gravity is off by a few millimeters, or the wing is not symmetric. Sometimes the wings or tails are bent, the fuselage (the plane body) breaks off, the rubber band snaps the propeller, the plastic coverings don’t stick well with the glue, and so on. Worse of all, when everything seems to go well in the construction process, the plane suddenly crashes immediately after you throw it into flight, and you have no idea why.
These are the challenges that makes you go back to the theory, relearn everything that you have learnt before but with higher motivations to “get it right”. Sometimes this process of going back to the basics allows you to have new understanding to bring back into building a new plane. But one thing for sure, you’ll become better at making each new one, perfecting your craft of building the indoor plane. This is basically the process of doing science and engineering that we hope to instill into students in this outreach program: the process of learning and relearning, the process perfecting theoretical understanding and practical skills, and the process of persevering to make things better each time. Trying to understand why things don’t work out the first few times is also an important process of doing science.
Problems in getting a plane to fly well can happen to anybody, and it did happen to us the organizer during the main competition. Speaking about bad timing, this problem couldn’t have happened at a worse time: it happened to us when we were about to demonstrate the indoor flight using a model Sdr. Haniff built to the entire crowd of participants and guests just before the main competition. What happened was, as usual Haniff tried to wound the rubber band 800 times using the electronic winder (the normal counts of winding every time he flew the plane). But this time the propeller mount snapped off! When he tried to put it back together, it wasn’t the same as before. The result was the plane flew level and started to descend right away without even climbing to get some good altitude to sustain a longer flight time. Nonetheless, it worked well before the propeller mount broke off. Here’s a video of its flight in our school hangar prior to the competition.