Frank Wicks, professor of
mechanical engineering, has authored an article that describes one man's
amazing feat of flying a six-pound model airplane loaded with five pounds of
fuel across the Atlantic Ocean in August 2003.
Wicks' article, “A Model Mission,”
appeared in the December 2004 issue of Mechanical
Engineering.
The flight was organized by
Maynard Hill, a 77-year-old and legally blind engineer. Hill has been building
model airplanes for seven decades, and has held most of the world records for
speed, altitude and distance. He was an invited lecturer in May of 2004 at the Empire State
Aero Science
Museum at the Schenectady County
Airport, where Wicks took
the opportunity to meet him.
The flight required reducing the
total weight of a Global Positioning System based automatic pilot, gyros,
process computer, and telemetry to satellites and radio control to a few
ounces.
Wicks notes the similarities
between the epic manned flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903 and Hill's model
flight a century later. Neither flight received much attention at the time.
However, the Wright's demonstrated the aeronautical principles that started the
aviation age. Hill's flight demonstrated the dramatic progress in avionics that
can be used over the next century for human and pilotless flight in air and
space.