Competition Day 3.

Our last flight didn’t go very well. We were fully prepared with our new airframe and were rearing to go the night before.

We launched the plane into the air and had a successful ~40 second flight. After which the plane crashed.

We are unsure as to what the crashed as further investigation needs to be done. The plane was flying fine and in very close range. It started an uncontrollable roll and never recovered. One idea is that perhaps the flaperons weren’t fully turned off. If they were only turned off half way this would have resulted in limited recovery ability. Another possibility is 2.4 GHz interference. Two other teams crashed today due to interference on the 2.4 GHz spectrum, and a few others experienced interference.

The rest of the day was fairly relaxed, with competition photos and packing the plane. We did still submit a report though.

That evening we attended the awards banquet. UAARG didn’t receive any prizes but the judges/competition organizers had many encouraging things to say and felt we performed well in different aspects.

Northrop Grumman was a big sponsor this year. They are fairly well known for Global Hawks, but make a wide variety of other systems, including their long range Triton system. The company representative there said there were three main things he was impressed with at competition. One of those things was UAARG’s modular design. He really liked our electronics boards. They have a very simple a laid out design. Each board is more or less identical allowing it to be swapped in and out readily. Components can also easily be swapped in and off the board. Yesterday’s fire was a fairly quick and easy fix due our voltage regulators being over rated for there task. As well our planes can swap parts, like wing and tail sections very easily.

Overall I am fairly impressed with our performance at competition this year. We may not have done well, but our system is a lot more mature and as a team we were able to handle issues as they arose.

Andrew and Rijesh apparetnly didn’t get the memo that UAARG’s team shirts were safety vests.

This will be the last daily blog post for Canadian Competition. A week or two from now a few more pictures from competition organizers will be posted.