Firestarter - The Rants of a Pyrophile

did you see the video? did you? did you??? that, ladies and gentlemen, was the freewing rc plane scratch built by your resident fire lover and her partner ida. it actually flew (not that i was surprised of course). here are the (approximated) project stats ...

243 hours of thinking
16 hours of cutting & sawing
24 hours of sanding & filing
15 hours of gluing
43.8 hours of being confused
19 hours of making mistakes
3 hours of being lost in ara damansara
12 hours in the car
198 hours in the lab
3.5 hours of being laughed at by the RC community
2 minutes of flight attempts
27 seconds of successful flight

like i said before, these are all approximated figures, which roughly means its completely inaccurate and unreliable. but all those things did happen, which is to say, yep, we did all the thinking, and we did the gluing, and we did get lost and, and, sure as heck, we got confused a lot too. and i mean A LOT. the whole free wing thing is rather new, even by modern aviation standards. and there arent a lot of literature on it so it was pretty much a 'figure-it-out-as-we-go-along' process. the situation got so bad that we were confused by units even when we had a calculator and unit converter. i mean, why would you divide units into sixteenths anyway? divide them into tenths like normal people.

but then again, the 27 seconds of flight was worth every second of being tired, stressed out and, generally, being in total agony over this project. now i know maybe a millionth of what it felt like when the Wright Bros managed to get Kitty Hawk up in the air. kudos to the pilot, mr wan though, who managed to fly the thingamagigy. he knew zilch about the free wing but put in so much effort to help us anyway. he's awesome. and you shouldve seen him land our plane. it was a belly landing (since our landing gear got torn off in the first flight attempt). not a scratch on the plane. it just sort of floated softly to the ground.

all in all its been crap load of craziness. the past few weeks especially had been so tiring but worthwhile. and now, i can go back to being a normal person and not someone who wakes up early, goes to bed late, and spends two thirds of the day in a lab/workshop building with no regard as to how i look.