Their story, in their words…
Before we could even start building the plane, we had to first align everyone’s schedules. This, in my opinion, was the most difficult part of this project.
After finally agreeing upon a date to meet up, we realised that we were left with only 2 days of the school year to make the plane. Within those two days, a lot was done. Since we could not finish the plane at school, I took it home and added the finishing touches.
Unfortunately we did make quite a few mistakes. For example, I failed to realise that the foam boards I bought were too weak and fragile to bend into different shapes. Due to this, we couldn’t build our ideal wing (downwards sloping). To improvise, we used barbecue skewers to outline the general shape.
Another fatal mistake I made was that the rechargeable battery I bought only had enough power for around 1-2 minutes of flight. We also couldn’t recharge the battery because buying the charger would put us beyond our budget.
As a consequence of this severe overlook, the battery ran out of charge before the plane could even lift off. A lot of the charge was used to figure out which direction the motor spun, and whether the servos could move the control horns on the elevator and rudder.
At the end, I removed the motor and all the electronics from the plane. However, we are confident enough to say that if the battery had charge, our plane would most definitely be in the air.
