MIT smites competitors in airplane contest

molliebatmit
Wed, 02 May 2007 19:32:55 +0000

Haha, don’t tell him that! He claims that it’s beautiful. (I agree with you – it’s pretty weird-looking.)

Basically, the rules this year favored light planes with small wingspans, because planes were assigned a sort of handicap score, and light planes with small wingspans got a better score. Their plane weighed just under 2 pounds, and the nearest competitor’s plane weighed 5 pounds, so the MIT team was already very much ahead even before flying.

If anybody’s interested in this sort of thing, their design report is [url=http://mit.edu/ajw61185/Public/DBF07/MIT%2520OBOSU%2520report.pdf]here[/url] (it’s a very big PDF, beware).