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People have dreamed of flying for thousands of years.
I mean, we're stuck on the ground
our entire lives, in two dimensions.
And to have that ability to leave the ground
and fly through the air, to be a bird,
it's a feeling it can't be described.
And not only to do it with an engine
or with all this construction around you,
but to literally do with a wing on your back
and at running speed, just run and jump in the air
and take flight, it's really an incredible thing
to be able to do.
So the cheesy truth of it is that I've always wanted to fly.
I've always been one of those people that's
just been fascinated by aircraft, by spacecraft,
by the notion of being able to leave the ground.
And not a lot of people get that experience on this scale.
Not many people design and build their own plane.
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Flugtag is a crazy competition where
teams build a homemade glider and push it off a platform
with a pilot in it to see who can get the furthest.
Basically the premise is, you build something meant to fly
and you push it off a barge 30 feet in the air.
These rarely go anywhere.
And I think most of it is just an excuse for people
to make fools out of themselves with tens of thousands
of people.
Our team is mostly aerospace engineers.
I'm actually the only member who's not.
But it was a really great experience
being a part of this team.
It's not every day you can find a group of guys
like this who will spend this much of their free time
building a plane that's only going to fly for eight seconds.
It's a once in a lifetime thing to build something like this.
How many people do you know who can say they've
built an airplane from scratch?
Everything in an airplane is pretty simple.
It's kind of surprisingly simple when
you kind of get down to it.
And you learn a lot about it in aerospace engineering studies.
One of the cool things about working here at MIT
is, you actually get to put that into practice.
And I guess that comes through in the materials that we use,
which are very often just construction materials for home
building, and resin and things like that for boat building.
And they all kind of come together
to make an airplane at the end of the day, which
was very cool.
We did a lot of designing for the actual shape of it.
That's the biggest part, aerodynamically
is, you have your shape for your aircraft and your weight.
And then that's how you determine how you fly.
What we didn't really exactly planned out
is how we put all these things together.
We knew our main structural components.
We knew we were going to use carbon fiber.
We knew we were going to have some mylar
plastic as our coating.
And we knew we had foam.
But how do those go together?
So one of the big problems with working with carbon fiber
is that, if you drill it, loses almost all of its strength.
And you had to find ways to create joints with carbon fiber
without drilling the carbon fiber.
And quite a few iterations bit the dust
as we talked through them, but eventually we
came up with an idea for aluminum fittings, which
is a detail that any mechanical engineer would probably
have in seconds.
But because we're all really based in the aeronautics realm,
we hadn't thought about quite as hard as we probably
should have.
This whole thing probably wouldn't have been possible
without the help of MIT.
We had all this room we can build this giant wing
and have our card and mock stuff up indoors.
This would have been really challenging
if we didn't have the space, because where would we
build this 24 foot long wing?
My house isn't big enough.
By even beyond the physical space,
there's so many resources here, like professors
and technical staff, who were always going to help and say
let me find the optimal flight path for you guys to fly.
So just the ambient knowledge of MIT coming together
as we're working really helped us pull off an awesome plane.
Well, that's the monkey ballers.
Let me tell you something, there's a big red owl here
today.
Monkey ballers are in the conversation.
I'm here with the entire team.
Bue we're going to start with the man
will be piloting the craft.
His name, Alex Bellstein.
He is the man dressed as the monkey.
So Alex, first and foremost, how are you
feeling here this morning?
We're feeling really good.
This is a lot of work that's gone into this plane.
And we know we're going to crush it.
There is another possibility, and that is you
go off the end of the flight deck,
directly into the Charles River in a crash that
would thrill the crowd and make Red Bull Flugtag
the true spectacle that it is.
Here they go.
Control line snapped.
We had everything working on the plane.
We had it tested and everything.
A few nights before the competition,
we realized that the problem in our testing
was that our center of gravity was too far aft.
So we moved it forwards, and we didn't redo
any of the math on the tail.
We just had the same control mechanism on the tail
that we did before.
I think it's an important engineering lesson too.
It doesn't matter if the wings are perfectly designed
or your balance is perfect, if you have a weak control
point, weak attachment somewhere, that's
the thing that's going to break.
In the space race, the Russians were
going to beat us to the moon, and they only
didn't make it because their plane blew up
on the launchpad a month before ours.
And I'm sure everything else about that rocket
would have gone to the moon except for one thing that
leaked, and it didn't go.
And I think engineering and especially
aerospace engineering in general has
a history of catastrophic failure with very, very
minor problems.
And the break at the end of the day,
it keeps our heads from getting too big.
And we're MIT, we're going to keep doing this.
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