On the morning of September 11th, a small group of Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics students set up their class project at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. The gear consisted of a small table, a couple of MacBooks and two battery-powered model airplanes. The goal: fly the autonomous balsawood and foam aircraft as high as possible.
One of the team, Zouhair Mahboubi, launched the first plane, throwing it into the air much like you or I would throw a paper-dart, and it behaved just the same, crashing to the ground a few seconds after launch. The second plane was more successful, and after take-off flew to 2,177 meters, or 7,142 feet, before the team lost contact.
Because the aircraft was autonomous, the flight didn’t end there. The plane went immediately into landing mode and made it safely back to land, and this turned out to be the trip that set an (unofficial) world record for autonomous craft under 5 kilos in weight. A third sortie saw similar altitudes, but before the plane could climb higher it flew too close to the edge of the allotted airspace — this was on NASA’s ground at Edwards Air Force Base, remember.
For the final attempt, the plane was sent soaring from a mile to the north to buy more climbing time before the strengthening winds again took the craft too far south. The plane, named Blue Panther, made it to 2,490 meters, or 8169 feet, but the winds finally won and blew it well off course to the East, where Blue Panther sent itself spiraling to Earth at 78 mph when it engaged “flight termination” mode. The flight was the highest, but because of the crash landing it doesn’t count for the record.
The students had managed to put these planes, very successfully, into the air where they pretty much looked after themselves, and to do it in just a year, from drawing board to sky. More surprisingly, the models cost just $500 each. Not pocket money, but the sort of success-to-cash ratio that is certainly to be attracting the military. Especially as the tests took place in its backyard.
Photo credit: Zouhair Mahboubi