This week the Tail Team of the Human Powered Airplane project worked on testing the deflection of the 26 foot tail boom and checking the movement of the rudder controls. We did this in order to get an idea of how the tail boom would react during flight and see if it could actually control the airplane. Using a force gauge we pulled the forked end of the tail boom that attaches to the tail up at 2 pound increments, going to a maximum load of 15 pounds. We chose a 15 pound maximum load because, although the expected lift from the elevator is 12 pounds, we wanted to add some safety factor and see how the boom would react in more adverse conditions. The deflection point, which is the potential attachment point of the tail boom, we tested was 16ft from the forked end of the tail boom. We discovered that the deflection and angle difference at 16 feet were almost half of those at an attachment point of 23ft from the forked end, which we tested a few weeks prior. This suggests that we should have a shorter boom for less deflection and potentially more tail control. As for the rudder controls we wanted to get an idea of how hard we would have to pull the wires of the control system to turn it and also think of ways to cut down the friction of the wire moving through the tail. We thus set up our tail in the hallway of Engineering Gateway and tried to move the tail surfaces. We ended up not having enough tension to effectively operate the pull-pull wire control system and so were not able to move the elevator and rudders well enough to our liking. We will proceed with further tests over the next few weeks to make sure that our tail surfaces are operating correctly.

By Samuel Reyes,  Human Powered Airplane