Our next project was a model plane. We were able to do it on our own or alone, I did it with a partner, what made some parts easier and definitely saved us time. It was a quite easy model made out of balsa wood. Also the fuselage was mainly build out of one long piece of balsa wood, which made it difficult, to decide what building method is used, I thought that it is semimonocoque, because the skin is part of the carrying structure in wings and tail section. The plane was powered by a rubber band engine. The wings were made out of two spares each, located at leading edge and trailing edge, and four ribs each. The inner rib on each wing was supposed to be slightly tilted, to provide the, for the stability needed, dihedral angle of the wings. But we failed on that, because while the glue was drying and we were concentrating on other parts of the plane the piece slid back into a vertical position. So we had to improvise something providing the needed stability. The landing gear was simply two pieces of wire and two little tires. To prevent the tires from falling of you had to bend the two ends of the wire up, but the wire was not very pliable. But after searching for pliers we managed to do it.
Then we had a flying day in the big gym. When we tested it the first time, the plane just drove straight, without leaving the ground against the opposite wall. That has shown us that the plane was well build, but the wings and together with them the center of pressure was to far back, giving the plane the tendency to fly down and by that preventing it from leaving the ground. So for our next flight we moved the wings a bit forward. So next time it came into the air, but still went straight through the gym against the opposite wall. Also that gave us the distance record, the not very long gym limited us concerning the flight time. To change that we then attached a little piece of carton to the left outside wing, to create drag and by this make the aircraft fly in a gentle left turn. Also it took us a few flights to find right amount of carton and by this drag, it worked in the end and gave us a flight time of 15 seconds, which was only three seconds behind the best flight.
While we were building on our model planes at home we did a field trip to the Boeing manufacturing facility in Seattle, and there were similarities between the building of our little simple model plane and these big and complicated civil jets we saw in Seattle. When we were building our model plane we started with one part, then went over to the next part, while at the first part the glue was drying and in the end glued all this parts together and similar to that Boeing produces the different parts of the 'Dreamliner' all over the world and then flies them together and puts them together in Seattle.
