AirSpaceMag.com

A typical F3A radio controlled airplane

That is, the remote control for my “RC” airplane (it actually stands for radio controlled). The first time I watched this video of Belgian armchair pilot extraordinaire Benoit Dierickx (who flies 737s for a living) putting a super-light model F3A aerobatic airplane through its paces inside a gymnasium, I found myself tugged by competing emotions. I couldn’t take my eyes off the aerobatic whirling dervish, though the soundtrack was rather cheese-laden (recognizable as the 1962 Quincy Jones big band arrangement “Soul Bossa Nova” off my Cocktail Mix Vol. 2: Martini Madness disc, and subsequently revived in Austin Powers films). I also wondered if Benoit ever gets bored after the 983rd snap roll—this thought from someone who has never flown his own RC airplane, but plans to get way into it in retirement (if that concept still exists for my 40-something generation).

When I was a painfully bored 7-year-old at Sunday mass, I used to imagine doing precisely Benoit’s routine with an RC airplane inside the church, with a perfect landing down the center aisle as the sermon ended.

I emailed the video to colleagues and got mixed reactions. Some thought it was cool. Others wondered, as I did, if it qualified as, shall we say, a niche hobby, like synchronized swimming. But who am I to snicker? It’s serious enough to these guys, who travel to F3A competitions across Europe all year, including the 2008 European Championship during the last week of August in Calcinatello di Calcinato, Italy. I don’t know where that is, but if it’s a sooty rail yard outside Milan, it sounds more exotic than wherever I was that week. Wildwood, New Jersey?

The F3A planes may be light—this one, made of balsa wood covered with plastic film, weighs just over 17 ounces—but they’re relatively large, so you can only imagine how light these little guys are.

And the FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale), the global umbrella organization for all things aeronautic, has a page describing the various aeromodeling categories such as F1 (free flight), F2 (control line), etc. You can’t deny that the F3A planes are about as maneuverable as anything in the air. Check out this routine by Gernot Bruckmann in a smaller gym. Next up: a phone booth.

Here’s something else I hadn’t seen. Sort of a version of slope soaring where the guy becomes the substitute for a landmass, and has to keep moving forward with his placard to create the effect of wind under his tiny glider. Not sure from this video how long he intends to keep this up. Seems there’s a curious little culture around indoor, mini-soaring. They look like a breathless mom following a toddler who just learned to walk.

For my money, the really cool hobby deals in flying replicas of the big jets, such as this RC version of a C-17 Globemaster that flies like a high performance fighter. Or here’s how an Airbus A380 might fly with afterburners. And who said the Concorde’s grounded? Nothing’s ever grounded, or impossible, in the RC world.

Cube life got you down? Download Voices of the Sky from Smithsonian Folkways and “tighten your safety belt, locate the nearest emergency exit, study the instructions for inflating your life jacket [and find] the courage—and the wattage—to turn up the sound to runway volume.”

Besides offering terrific liner notes, this 1957 Emory Cook CD lets you eavesdrop on a seven-minute crew briefing, listen to control tower chatter, and submerge yourself in the “worldly howls of military jets.”

“The thing about Emory Cook,” says Jeff Place, an archivist with Folkways, “is that he had a giant cult following in the 1950s. Cook records were aurally interesting; he’d put out recordings of earthquakes and firecrackers and railroad trains. There’s a strong following even now.”

Once you’ve exhausted the “piston-driven airliners with their reassuring throaty roars,” head into space with Voices of the Satellites, a 1958 recording produced by Moses Ashe of Folkways. “Ashe had this whole science series he would sell to schools and universities,” says Place. “Sounds of Medicine, Sounds of Animals, that sort of stuff. These recordings exist as a sort of snapshot in time.” Travel back to the beginning of the space race with Voices of the Satellites, and you’ll hear Sputnik’s distinctive beep, the heartbeat of Laika, the dog the Soviets sent into orbit, and the roaring of Explorer and Vanguard rockets.

On Man in Space: The Story of the Journey, a Folkways recording from 1964, you can listen to Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard talking to mission control, a bit of history from the first American manned mission into space.

Smithsonian Folkways is offering 20 percent off these recordings until March 31, 2009 as a special offer to readers of The Daily Planet. Use the code “DailyPlanetSFW” when ordering.

Earl Wood, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic Aero Medical Unit who pioneered the study of G-forces on pilots in the early jet age, died on March 18 at the age of 97. The Mayo Clinic has a short sketch of his career and a documentary film in two parts.

Combine instant celebrity with cute, furry (though slightly creepy) animals, and you have pretty much the perfect subject for Web 2.0. The ex-bat that clung to space shuttle Discovery‘s external fuel tank during blast-off last week now has its own Twitter site, YouTube videos, web sites and Facebook page. Not to mention nearly 4,000 Google news hits. As of this writing (wait 20 minutes and it will change), DiscoveryBat has 285 followers hanging on every posthumous tweet.

Seven students from the Iolani School, Honolulu, Hawaii, accept the trophy for winning the Department of Energy's Real World Design Challenge.

As a woman, I hate to report that the team that won a U.S. Department of Energy engineering competition last weekend was all girls, as if to say, “Check out the girls! They can be engineers, just like boys!” I mean of course they can. But I have to admit that in a historically guy-dominated field like aeronautical engineering—the teams were competing to design an efficient aircraft wing—it’s something of a shake-up that of the ten high schools that made it to the national finals the winner was the only all-girl team, from the Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawaii. They got a BIG trophy at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum Saturday night, $3,000 for Iolani School’s science department and a really nice model of a Citation X from Cessna, one of the event sponsors. (really nice; I wanted it.) And each of the seven team members got an iPod Shuffle (which I also wanted).

How did they win?

First, by crunching numbers—but all the teams did that. Under DOE auspices, Parametric Technology Corporation donated PRO/Engineer CAD software to all participating high school science departments. All the teams started with the same given fuselage and requirement to find the most efficient wing—the one that produced the most lift with the least drag—and so minimize fuel consumption at a cruising speed of 400 knots. Some top-ranking teams started with various airfoils downloaded from an online database assembled by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They used the software to compute lift-to-drag ratios based on the airfoils in combination with a number of other variables—wing area, chord length, angle of attack, degree of sweep, taper—that led to a mind-boggling number of possibilities and long, long hours waiting for their computers to spit out results.

The competition was called the Real World Design Challenge because the problems that students have to solve are ones facing working engineers. Every airline today would jump at a more efficient aircraft wing, for example, and the problems in future challenges—this was the inaugural competition—will be likewise real. Also, the circumstances of the competition are real-world: the software was the same kind that professional engineers use, wasn’t always student-friendly, and in some cases showed up only weeks before the deadline.

My money had been on the second-place (coed) team from Newburyport High School in Newburyport, Massachusetts. (There wasn’t gambling, actually, but I offer the idea to the Department of Energy to increase interest in the event next year.) I may have been betting on them because that’s the team I watched rehearse their presentation earlier in the day, but they also expressed their results in a way I could understand: Their wing had a lift/drag ratio of 16-point-something, only slightly more efficient than a 747 wing, team member Irene Jacqz was able to point out. (Jacqz has been accepted early decision to Columbia University. Hey, Columbia: wise move.)

While the team rehearsed, I asked their coach, Sarah Leadbeater, how much she had helped them. “I teach introduction to Computer Assisted Design, industrial design, and Web design,” she said—not aerodynamics. “The first time I saw their presentation was yesterday.”  ’Nuff said.

Before they started on the state challenge in November (state winners went on to the national challenge), a few of the students from Newburyport knew about lift, drag, thrust, and gravity from their physics classes, but none of them had heard the terms “wave drag” or “supercritical wing,” the key to efficiency in their design. “I had heard the word ‘transonic,’ but I didn’t know what it meant,” said Phil Arets, who smoothly explained during his team’s allotted 15 minutes that they narrowed the original 12 airfoils they considered to five “because their research had shown that airfoils with flatter tops would eliminate wave drag.”

I have a theory about why the Hawaii team won, but the judging was confidential, so I have no way to test my hypothesis. Of all the teams that presented, only the Hawaii team showed unusual wing designs that they tested but abandoned. They tried forward sweep, for example, and showed a picture of what they called a “curved wing,” which they thought would join to the fuselage with less disruption to the airflow. (The curved wing looked especially innovative, not to mention aesthetically pleasing. I’d never seen anything like it, but the students mentioned a reference for it that I didn’t catch.) In both cases, the team found that drag went literally off the charts, and, not having the time to pursue these unconventional designs, they went back to the tried and true.

If aerospace companies are so worried about a future labor force, maybe they should borrow a few practices from professional baseball. Saturday night would have been a good time to show up at the National Air and Space Museum with scouts and signing bonuses. They could have picked off any number of brainy extroverts from the high school teams at the reception, choosing among mini-cheeseburgers, chunks of pizza, and cookies in the shape of swept-wing aircraft dipped in chocolate. I ate two of each, feeling much more confident than I ever have that social security funds will be there when I retire.