But before their competition, one of the students and I drove the 3 hours to go see the dynamic soaring guys do their thing at Weldon, CA. Here's a video made a couple of years ago on the same hill. Pretty thrilling for me..
I told them to add "daho" to the "BYU-I" so people would know it wasn't the BYU-1 team. There were teams from Poland, India, China, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, and all over the US..
After the first successful flight, with 12 lb payload.
The team made and flew a prototype before going to the competition, to test things out. After getting the prototype flying well, they made some design changes, and built the competition plane based on those changes. One of the things they did was move the center of gravity way back. (Because they mis-understood something very fundamental which I had been trying to tell them.) So the competition plane didn't fly so swell. They had to move the center of gravity back up by tacking on three quarter-inch steel plates.
After the second successful flight with 15 lb payload. Even though a third round was scheduled Saturday, the organizers called it a day after this round, so we never got to fly with our intended 18 lb. We would have scored higher if we'd had that last flight. All the other teams flew Sunday, while we were righteous and went to church. And then to the beach. We ended up 18th overall, with the 8th heaviest payload carried. (The team with the heaviest payload carried 30 lb, though..)
