Overview

AME 105 is USC’s introductory aerospace engineering course, Introduction to Aerospace Engineering. As a final project for the class, students put together a balsa-wood glider model and fly them off in the last day of class, or Glider Day.

The final deliverable for the class is a report that includes a theoretical presentation, performance predictions of the glider with rough wetted area calculations and estimated airfoil characteristic, and finally comparison of these predictions to the real flight test results.

Report

The final report for out group is embedded (and downloadable) below:

A Little Extra

With a balsa-wood glider and some time to spare, my colleague and friend Nicholas (with the great help of his younger brother Paul) decided to give the saiplane a bit of an upgrade: make it RC!

We hollowed out the forward segment of the fuselage, drilled some holes in the front, and installed a small BLDC motor with a propeller sized by the “looks good” rule. With some spare foam, we cut out thin rectangles for the control surfaces, hinged them, and installed some servos on the lower surface of the wing. We did the same for the tail.

The final product was not the prettiest - hard to call it a sailplane - but it flew!