Flying Anteater Keeps Nose to Ground
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 had too much weight in the snout.
A five-member team from the university competed with 100 mechanical engineering students from more than 30 universities across the United States and Canada in the International Radio-Controlled Cargo Aircraft Competition, a two-day event that ends today.
The object of the competition, held at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, was to design a plane capable of lifting the most weight while still landing in one piece.
Each team has three chances to qualify for the final round today.
The team from UC Irvine still could win the competition--if it can make the appropriate modifications to its $5,000 aircraft in time.
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.
“The way it hugs the ground, it’d make a great race car,” jeered a man in the crowd.
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.
After that incident, the students put orange tape across the length of the right wing so that the pilots could see the plane better. But team members ran into a new set of problems as their 1.3-horsepower engine pushed the Anteater down the runway like a Jeep instead of a plane.
It was rather disappointing for team members, who have put in 40 hours a week for 28 weeks designing and building the aircraft to precise computer-corrected specifications, as well as soliciting donations and explaining the project. One team member said the time demands nearly cost him his girlfriend.
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. They competed with teams from as far as Ohio and as near as UC Davis.
