The last week of my internship proved to be very busy as we tried to finish all of the projects we had been working on so that the team felt ready for their upcoming deployments. We flew a lot last week, trying to finally make the new ground station work and trying to get the aircraft to follow the van.
On Monday we flew a Skywalker hoping to make the ground station box work. We were able to get enough data to figure out how to finally fix the ground station but unfortunately a power problem within the aircraft resulted in a hard emergency landing that grounded the plane until we could get back to the lab. Once the fixes were made to the ground station box, we flew a Tempest on Thursday with great success. The ground station worked perfectly and we were able to get the aircraft to follow the van. There still is some tweaking to do to avoid the plane overshooting during turns, but for the most part everything worked as intended.
Setting up to fly the Tempest
During both flights, I again worked the ground station, sending commands and directions to the aircraft during the flight.
In the lab, we continued to work on the Buffalo prototype. We finished gluing the fuselage blocks together and cut out the nose and tail fairings with the foam cutter. After that, we cut slots for the wing spars in the fuselage and then coated everything in packing tape. We cut out control surfaces from the wings and sheeted them in balsa. The wingtips and vertical stabilizer also had to be made and coated, and finally the whole plane was put together with more packing tape and several different kinds of glue. We finished the plane on Friday afternoon and I was able to test-fly it a few times before I left. Unfortunately I never got to see it fly more than a few feet, as when I left we were still trying to balance it out so that it wouldn’t immediately stall.
The finished Buffalo prototype
I drove home on Saturday. It’s good to be back, but I already miss working at RECUV. This has been a truly amazing experience and I’d like to send a huge thank you to anyone and everyone who had a hand in making this possible for me. I look forward to continuing my adventure in aerospace engineering. This summer has been an awesome start to a hopefully successful career working with air and spacecraft.
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