‘Anteater’ Licked : UCI Students’ Entry in Model Airplane Competition Doesn’t Fly

It’s hard to imagine anything more earthbound than an anteater.

And, to the dismay of UC Irvine students testing their wings Saturday in an odd competition featuring grown-ups playing with radio-controlled planes, the Flying Anteater lived up to its namesake.

It never got off the ground. Perhaps it was too much weight in the snout.

A five-member team from the university competed with 100 mechanical engineering students from 30 other colleges across the United States and Canada on Saturday in the International Radio-Controlled Cargo Aircraft Competition, a two-day event that will wind up today.

The object of the competition, held at Mile Square Park, is to design a plane capable of lifting the most weight while still landing in one piece.

Each team gets three chances to qualify.

The team from UC Irvine still could win the competition--if it can make the appropriate modifications to its $5,000 aircraft by today.

Ironically, the UC Irvine team had just been awarded first place for having the best design for its entry, which weighs about eight pounds and has a 96-inch wingspan.

But, as the team learned the hard way, theory doesn’t always translate into reality.

“We’ll just have to adjust the weight in the next round,” said team captain Mike Lin, 22, an engineering major, moments after the Anteater failed to achieve liftoff.

The flashiest, snazziest numbers seemed to perform the worst during Saturday’s qualifying rounds. A smart-looking military-style transport plane painted camouflage green, taxied boldly up to the runway, then, never got airborne.

Another eye-catcher, with bright lime-green wings, climbed promisingly above the runway, only to spiral into a nose dive and crash into a nearby field.

Two months ago, the prototype for the Flying Anteater met the same fate during a test run at Mile Square Park in preparation for this weekend’s event. Team members cringed before confessing that the problem was “pilot error.” It seemed that they feared offending Jerry Smith or Yale Lasker, longtime pilots of radio-controlled model airplanes who were sharing the controls during heats Saturday.

After the test run, the students put orange tape across the length of the right wing so that the pilots could better see the plane. But team members ran into a new set of problems Saturday as their 1.3-horsepower engine pushed the Anteater down the runway like a lumbering truck instead of a graceful plane.

Besides Lin, team members include Ana Puentes, 23, of Moorpark; John Tsai, 23, of Alhambra; Tean Ly, 21, of Santa Ana, and Lin’s 21-year-old brother, Gary, who also is graduating this year.