To the Flite Test Community,
Never tell a student that a project is impossible, this is what I learned working with 7th grade student Josh this year. Josh being a surface engineer in our class wanted to recreate the famous Peter Sripol flying car episode using whatever equipment we had in the shop. At first I was hesitant for a lot a reasons, some you can probably already guess, but something inside told me to let this kid go with it. He was extremely excited about the project, he wanted to learn about the air division aspect as well, and he wanted to leave his mark on MESArc forever by creating something awesome! After months of research and building, along with struggles that he himself overcame to complete the project, he was able to share it with all of you and accomplish exactly what he set out to do, leave his mark on MESArc forever by being the first kid to make a car fly on a fixed wing aircraft.
Josh chose the FT Bronco, designed by Sripol, to be his flying platform for the project. Reconfigured the front to fit a 1:10 scale truck and the rest was history.
As you can see in this picture his one motor was angled down, however, that didn't stop it from flying.
The wing sat perfectly on the back bed of the truck, which we took out the suspension to make it a lot stronger to support the weight that it was taking on. The final product looked awesome!
After playing around with other Broncos in the class, we love the inverted triangle control surface system in the rear, made it easy for pitch and control.
Here was Peter's solution that Josh worked off of.
So we could easily mount the plane on the car, Josh engineered a rack system that simply ziptied to the truck.
Driving the car was easy! No rudder was used for this, it was all the steering components of the truck.
First attempt did not stop us, we tried it again!
And what a cool and exciting scene it was!
He did it, Josh will always be remembered as the kid who made a truck fly!
I can only imagine what ideas Josh's project sparked in the other students. Maybe we'll see the proverbial pigs fly one day?
Huzzah and well done, Josh!
-- Mike
Log In to reply