SF Electric Ultralight Student Project
Pat & Dennis Bender Experimental Aircraft Development Fund
J. Dennis Bender
Office, Home & Cell Phone: 859-391-5226
5726 La Jolla Blvd. – Suite 311
La Jolla, CA 92037-7345
&
Office - 100 Riverside Pl. - Suite 303
Covington, KY 41011-5711
We support experimental-aircraft development and applications for EMS, under-served-rural-communities, native-Americans, border-patrol, forestry-management, etc. (After initially incorporating in KY to form a single 501(c)(3), we dissolved that entity for a simplified form creating an entirely self-financed, private-philanthropy. A Vanguard National Trust account has been setup for making annual-grants for specific experimental-aviation-related projects in conjunction with the Experimental Aircraft Assoc. Foundation [EAA] in Oshkosh, WI.) and similar organizations.
www.JDBender.com – Pat & Dennis Bender eVTOL Experimental Aviation Fund (Vanguard National Trust)
www.JDBender.org – Pat & Dennis Bender Dementia Diagnosis Fund (Vanguard National Trust)
September 3, 2023
A computer-aided-design (CAD) process helped San Francisco Bay Area high-school students in Flight Club Aerospace engineer and build an electric-ultralight. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
Just as these high-school-students were doing at S.F.’s Flight Club Aerospace back in 2020, I am now trying to do the same with a similar project in San Diego at their Air & Space Museum. I’ve purchased a partially-completed, experimental-ultralight-eVTOL project and it’s now being delivered to the Museum’s annex at Gillespie Field.
Our objective is just what NASA, EAA Foundation and the AOPA are also attempting to do: “growing participation in aviation,” with their virtual-reality-flight-simulator at the EAA Oshkosh-2023 Youth Welcome Center, NASA STEM Zone and NEXTGEN Aviators. I too had been investigating electrified-ultralights back then, before switching to the eVTOL form-factor instead. What I want to add to such experiences is the actual visceral-feel of flying – not just a stationary, video-game-simulation, that is nothing like actually flying!
California high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area enjoy the camaraderie of Flight Club Aerospace.
[Photos courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
“Flight Club has become so much more than just building a plane. It’s become an education, a curriculum, and a community. . . An added safety benefit to pilots learning how their aircraft’s flight-controls are engineered and how they operate.”
California Students Building Electric-Ultralight from Scratch
Flight Club Aerospace Empowers Youth to Pursue Aviation Passion
August 26, 2020 - By David Tulis [ https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/articles-by-author/david-tulis ]
High-school-students in the San Francisco Bay Area are brainstorming, building, and learning to fly an electric-powered-ultralight through Flight Club Aerospace.
The student-led initiative empowers the group of teens from various Bay Area high schools to learn effective management skills while engineering and constructing a flyable Part-103-ultralight completely from scratch with a spotlight on new technology and safety. Key-parts of the plan include a marketing-team, an outreach team, and sponsors—but one element the team isn’t relying on is a faculty-representative.
“We went from 0-to-12-members in like 5-minutes,” said rising Senior and Co-Founder Rudy Lee. When fellow students learned about Flight Club Aerospace, Lee said their reactions were enthusiastic and encouraging. When he told them that they’d be designing and building an airplane on their own, they were all-in.
Lee said he’s an “engineer and a product designer at heart,” and he helped found the club to strike the balance between “total professionalism and just being goofballs. For me, personally, I’m more into mechanical engineering, but aerospace combines so many different forms of engineering.”
The club’s single-seat, under 254-pound ultralight-design (without pilot or fuel) stalls at less than 24-knots and has a maximum cruise speed of 55-knots. “The whole idea behind it is this doesn’t have to be regulated, and you don’t need a pilot-license, but for safety purposes, everyone who flies will get a pilot-certificate first,” Lee confided. “Flight Club has become so much more than just building a plane. It’s become an education, a curriculum, and a community.”
“I’m more interested in the engineering” said Maya Ayoub, a rising Junior who has 10 hours of private-pilot-training under her belt. She “stumbled across their Instagram one day,” and after she viewed computer-aided-designs of their wing, she was hooked. “I said, ‘This is sick.’” Learning the science behind the power-of-flight “has always been in the back of my mind,” she added. “Becoming a part of this project—Oh my gosh, there are so many revelations. When you’re taking your private-pilot-lessons, you get a little of the science, but this project has opened the door for me to learn more about the physics-of-flight.” She said there’s an added safety benefit to pilots learning how their aircraft’s flight-controls are engineered and how they operate.
Rising Senior and Co-Founder Ollie Krause credits his mom, Janice Lin, for naming the initiative Flight Club Aerospace instead of “ultralight independent study” because it sounds a lot more fun. His main interests are in drone-racing, model-airplane-building, and chemistry-experiments—which occasionally result in “blowing-stuff-up” by accident, he admitted, [just as I did as a young kid.] Krause is mentoring the team on how to use laths, mills, and computer-numerical-control-machining, and is also coaching them on circuit-board-design.
The ultralight will be simple, Krause said. “First of all, none of us knew anything about engines. We talked about a changing center of gravity when you use fuel,” and then there are spark-plugs, a fuel-system, and other electromechanical-systems common to fuel-burning-engines.
The student-led-team decided to use electric-power instead, with a fixed-pitch-prop and a three-piece-power-system that can be separated into 3 basic-building-blocks—a lithium-ion-battery-pack, an electric-motor, and a power-management-system with a speed-controller to avoid-overheating.
Krause said the design team is planning to use a 25-kilowatt-motor that equates to “something like 28-to-30-horsepower,” and weighs “close-to-100-to-125-pounds” with a custom-battery-pack that provides the juice to get airborne and then fly-for-an-hour-or-so.
A spreadsheet indicates an optimized discharge rate that determines how long the aircraft can stay aloft, and how much payload it can carry. “One thing we do have is that it’s extremely-efficient,” Krause explained. “Our electric-powertrain is going to be at least 80% efficient and we’re hoping to go to 90% or 95% efficiency.”
The team is publishing blog-posts on their successes and is brutally-honest about how to avoid some of their failures. “The hot-wire-cutter is not your friend,” they concluded after fabricating their first wing ribs. “Right-off-the-bat we struggled cutting our rib-profiles out of the XPS-foam using our janky-home-made hot-wire-cutter,” they wrote. “Anyways, we learned a lot while constructing our first prototype ribs and we thought we’d share some of our lessons with y’all so you can *hopefully* avoid making the same mistakes,” a blog-post advised.
An engineering-notebook with the designs and details that can be shared openly with interested students at other schools could help similarly minded aviation students, Krause theorized. “If we design an electric open-source ultralight, then maybe other students can do it too,” he encouraged.
California high school students in Flight Club Aerospace are designing, building, and learning to fly an electric-powered ultralight aircraft. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
San Francisco Bay Area student Justin Tien-Smith uses a computer during one phase of a student-led aircraft engineering, designing, and building project. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
Flight Club Aerospace co-founder Ollie Krause solders wires during the ultralight build process. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
High school students in Flight Club Aerospace work on a wing-rib for an ultralight. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
California high school students paint a wing rib for an ultralight aircraft they are building. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
A high-school student cuts a tube for an ultralight aircraft build project. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
Students perform a spar structure test for an ultralight they are building. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
Students in Flight Club Aerospace meet via Zoom to talk about strategy, engineering, marketing, outreach, and other aspects of their ultralight project. [Photo courtesy of Flight Club Aerospace.]
David Tulis - Senior Photographer - Joined AOPA in 2015 and is a private pilot with single-engine land-and-sea ratings and a tailwheel endorsement. He is also a certificated remote pilot and co-host of the award-wining AOPA Hangar Talk podcast. David enjoys vintage aircraft and photography.
[Keywords and compound-keywords (tags) are highlighted-and-hyphenated in italic-and-bold; place-names, organizations and titles are in bold; media-names put in italic. Instead of underlining, I’ve been experimenting with hyphenating entire phrases – long-tail-keywords. This odd style was being tried to enhance generative-AI processing and ease-of-spotting items-of-interest in my specific website-achieved documents. Now experimenting with generative-AI to eliminate this time-consuming distraction.]
{SF Electric Ultralight Student Project}
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