Gliders

1) An image of your completed glider design.

2) Your Glider Challenge: Design Phase notes.
We decided on making a glider with a fairly large wingspan with triangular support structures within the wings. We did our best to make the equilateral triangles so that the force would be distributed evenly. We also settled on a double tail design in hopes that it would keep the glider in a straighter path while it flew. The wood was put together using both tape and glue, and we used thin layers of the adhesive to connect the tissue paper to the aircraft.

3) Your Glider Challenge: Test Phase notes.
Without the added weight to the nose, the glider would flip around and fall to the floor in a somewhat oscillating pattern much like how a leaf would fall from a tree on a cool autumn day. Wrapping a thick layer of tissue paper to the tip helped stabilize this issue. We also noticed that the size of the wings may have been too big because they were bending with just their weight. This was not a huge problem during the test phase, but was a big problem during the actual challenge.

4) Your Glider Challenge competition day results. How did your glider perform? What would you change if we competed again?
When we first walked into the engineering room on the day of the competition, we were horrified to see that our glider's wings were broken. With some tape and spare wood, we were able to patch up the wings. In terms of distance, our glider was rather unimpressive since it failed to go in a straight flight path but rather flipped over itself due to the air resistance. The strong air current also re-broke the wings in our later attempts. Luckily, our wounded-warrior excelled in staying in the air for a long time. This is probably due to the fact that the wings gave the glider a very large surface area allowing it to simply float to the ground in a relatively time consuming manner.