Broken Wing Grounds ‘Big Bird’ at UC Irvine

Perhaps it was an inherent flaw in the skeleton of the human-powered flying machine that prevented its seven UC Irvine student creators from getting it too far off the ground Thursday morning.

But perhaps, as student Ken Pulido suggested, it was the craft’s name, Big Bird, that finally grounded the 130-pound, 95-foot-wide aircraft.

“I told you we should have named it Rodan” (after the surreal creature that soared in old Japanese movies), Pulido yelled after a wing of the Styrofoam, balsa-wood and Mylar structure bent beyond repair. “Big Bird can’t fly!”

The student project, one of 13 in the UC Irvine mechanical engineering program, is a requirement for graduation. Taking flight, however, is not.

“They will still graduate if it doesn’t fly,” assured their teacher, Roger Rangel, who stood by while the students made several attempts with their clumsy bird.

The senior projects, including a remote-controlled blimp, a solar-powered car and a human-powered hydrofoil, will be on display June 15 in the Engineering Plaza at the UC Irvine campus.

Rangel’s students had, since the beginning of the school year, drawn designs and built tools and equipment for their dream machine.

They even had to build an oven long enough to bake rolls of carbon-fiber cloth, which became the wing-structure tubing.

Over the years, the students had taken classes that prepared them for this final project, Rangel said. And even though the aircraft lifted for only a few seconds, the lessons they learned from the project will stay with them, he said.

“It’s probably the single most related aspect of what they will do later,” Rangel said. “They’ll probably think of this as the highlight of their studies.”

Several companies, including Epsilon Foam Corp., DuPont, Pacific Scientific and TRW, were contacted to donate money and materials. Big Bird acknowledged their contributions with logos stuck on the sides of its Mylar-covered fuselage, which was left over from last year’s Pegasus project.

Unlike Big Bird, though, Pegasus glided more than 300 feet after several tries last year. Big Bird tried several times, but cables broke and had to be replaced and the bicycle chain that linked the pilot’s pedals to the propeller shaft kept falling off its sprocket.

The trick was to keep the aircraft light enough to take flight yet sturdy enough to hold together.

“Once you get close to flying, just a few ounces can make the difference between flying and not flying,” said student Craig Takahashi, holding up the right wing while repairs were made.

The team, in recruiting a pilot, had to find a good cyclist who was light enough to keep the total aircraft weight at 260 pounds.

Weighing in at 129 pounds, Brian Ignatin, captain of the UC Irvine cycling team, fit the profile. He dressed in full bicycle gear, with helmet, biking shorts and shoes.

But the team’s hopes of sending their creation through the air ended in the early morning when a carbon-fiber tube stretching from the right side of the fuselage bent upward, cracking the Styrofoam support on the leading edge of the wing.

It also started a destructive chain reaction along the craft, ending with the collapse of the wheels of the bicycle-like fuselage.

“After so many tries, it just gave out,” Rangel explained. “It was too much stress.”