The ARF Plane

One of the key aspects of the Design Build Fly competition is the requirement that the plane structures must not be derived from pre-assembled parts. For a team in their first year of competition, this is a very daunting idea. A plane is a piece of machinery with obviously requires very careful construction and planning in order to work properly. Without the benefits of using the pre-made parts of more experienced designers, the entire process instantanesouly becomes magnitudes of order more complicated.

In order to gain the experience needed to complete our own design though, our team made the choice to buy and complete an Almost Ready to Fly, or ARF, Plane.

Example of an ARF Plane

The hope was that by designing a plane that had some similarities to the our competition plane, we could gain some basic background knowledge which we could apply to our own design.

The process began soon after the initial tests of the Duraplanes which our team created, and continued throughout the next few months until the determination was made to retire the plane until it might be needed again since it was felt the experience had generated about as much as it currently could.

Students doing pre-flight work on our ARF Plane

The ARF Plane awaiting its turn to fly

Check back soon for video of our ARF Plane in action.

Design Build Fly - An Overview

In Fall 2008, as part of the senior design class required by the University for graduation in Mechanical Engineering, the UK Design Build Fly team was created. This group, made up initially of 11 seniors, quickly expanded to close to 30 people. The goal was to compete in a competition which required a plane to be built without the aid of pre-constructed parts (with exception in areas such as motors). With stringent requirements to be met in order to be eligible to compete (Complete Rules can be found at http://www.aiaadbf.org/) the team set-out to undertake this enormous task.

With the competition less than a month away, this blog will serve to give updates to the progress of the team as it prepares for its entry into AIAA's Design Build Fly contest. Please continue to check in regularly for information about our team's progress.

The following are pictures from our early construction attempts on duraplanes done earlier last semester:

The lab

Students Monokoting a wing

Working on the tail

The labs favorite actress

Ready to fly

To see the plane take-off, please visit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31347822@N04/2935877567/in/set-72157607977664207/

For more pictures of the beginnings of Design Build Fly, you can also visit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31347822@N04/

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