MarkVZ
Posts: 32
Joined: 10/30/2002
From: Starkville, MS,
Status: offline
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David,
Thanks for the comments. .
I wish I would have talked to more people too. I just mostly silently observed other teams' entries. I didn't want to ask too many questions and seem nosey, but in hindsight I'm sure they wouldn't have thought that.
I did catch up with some of the guys from Western Michigan University. I had originally planned on going there till I found out about Miss. State. I'm from northern Michigan so I happened to be one of two "yankees" on a team of southerners, but they treat me just like anyone else and they make me feel at home there. They make fun of my "northern accent" once in a while but that's about it  I made the mistake of saying "ya, you betchya!" in front of some of my teammates once and they laughed at me. Oh well. I never knew I had any accent till I lived in the south for a while.
Anyways it was interesting to see how well the school I was planning on going to did. I found out that they don't even let freshmen into their DBF class so I wouldn't have even been able to go to the competition this year had I gone there! Just some things I get to find out after I make my decisions.
I found the guys from Canada to be particularly friendly and outgoing. They seemed to have the most laid-back view on things and didn't seem to get flustered by anything. A really great bunch of guys.
I have a lot of memories from this competition that I'll never forget. We had our plane in our hotel room and were reinforcing the landing gear mounts with some aluminum and heavy duty contact cement and we were getting pretty goofy from the fumes. Or having to find a way to muffle the sounds of our drills so as not to alert the hotel management; also many late late nights me and my teammates put into getting our 2nd plane built in the two weeks we had left after our first plane got destroyed. Our faculty advisor left his video camera with us in the DBF room to film our progress periodically and I bet we could make a hilarious "out-takes" film from that footage. We'd stick people in our assembly box and when someone would come in to see what our project was about, we'd tell em to look at the assembly box at which time the guy inside would pop out and scare the daylights out of the visitor. After destroying our first plane, we found the assembly box was great for collecting the pieces. We called it "the casket" as it had 4 brass handles and was stained dark, and had a red felt lining. I believe we carried our wrecked prototype off the field pallbearer style
I would spend some 14 hour days in our DBF room in those final two weeks until one day our chief engineer came in and told us that our hygiene had gone to hell and that she was giving us a day off, no iff's and's or but's. We wanted to work on it and make more progress, but she was firm in her decision. She said we couldn't come in to work on the plane under any circumstances. I grinned a bit so she threw in "and no, you can't take it to your dorm and work on it, Mark!!" She knew me too well, as I had built a small plane in my room earlier that year. So that day us r/c builders, out of the job for a day, decided to get together and fly our own R/C planes. Each of us damaged our planes and our pilot totalled his huge Chipmunk due to raio failure. With our planes rendered unflyable, We figured we'd play a joke on our chief engineer, and we hid all the plane parts in our DBF room very well. Our pilot got an upset phone call from her saying that the plane was gone. (First thing she asked was "Where's Mark?" Apparently, someone had left the doors unlocked and it appeared as if someone had stolen our plane! She wasn't too happy with us, but she allowed us to live She was a great chief engineer and I don't know what we would have done without her. This coming year is going to be tough if we can't convince her to come back.
Our region's AIAA conference in Kitty Hawk was a great time as well. We gave a presentation on our design, but the problem was that our only airframe at the time was destroyed. So we loaded the remains into the assembly box and took them anyways. I was so relieved when they didn't ask our presenting members to open the box to reveal the shattered balsa and shredded monokote mess mixed with some Mississippi mud that was supposed to be the great plane we were giving a presentation on. I later buried a piece of our first prototype near the Wright Brother's memorial as a tribute to our fallen plane.
All in all I think very highly of the whole DBF competition. There was no better way for me as a freshman to get to know upperclassmen in my major, and be able to contribute to and take pride in a school project. Also the interaction with other schools is great, and I think it furthers the engineering skills of everyone involved. I had been building and flying R/C for nearly 7 years when I joined our team, but I still ended up learning a great amount.
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