A few months have passed after the 2024 Air Cargo Challenge in Aachen, and it is a good time to look back at our journey in the competition.
The journey began back in August 2023 when our Team leader held the first meeting to talk about the challenge and to put together a team. At the beginning, there were a few meetings where we got familiar with the competition and started to think about different concepts for our model plane.
We quickly decided in favour a wing-dominant design concept and started to calculate the needed specifications to build it. During the process, the model plane became nearly entirely a wing and tail and the so-called body became just a carbon fibre tube. Due to its huge wingspan of 4,6 meters and funny looking body without a doubt we caught the eye of many of the participants at the competition.
The building process was fairly quick since we got our materials a bit late and were under a tight schedule. Since our team wasn’t too big, we had to work long days to get our plane ready for the test flight. Fortunately, our team included a couple of experienced ACC attendants who had been building the previous model planes, so we got everything ready in time. The test flight was a huge success, and the team was enthusiastic about the upcoming competition.
We were ready for the competition, and we began our trip from Tampere early in the morning of July 9th and arrived in Aachen in time for the welcome dinner. The first day of competition began at the airfield where we assembled the Pallokärry (“ball wagon” in Finnish). After the technical inspection there was time for a test flight. Unfortunately, our plane did not take off for the test flight and we had to make some modifications to our plans. We were lucky to get some spare parts from the field to resolve the problems.
After a good night’s sleep, we woke up optimistic and ready for the new competition day. We just didn’t know what the day would bring. Day two was the first real competition day and it included two rounds of flights. As some may know, our first flight did not end too well, and we crashed. Because of that, we had a bit hectic afternoon trying to repair the plane.
Again, we were really lucky to get some materials from the fellow competitors and we were able to repair the plane. After having repeated the technical inspection, we were ready to tackle flight number two. To our delight Pallokärry took off accompanied with many encouraging cheers and applauses. The team was more than happy after the rollercoaster of emotions encountered during the day.
The last day of competition was rainy and because of the wet grass on the airfield we did not get the aircraft going. Despite of the difficulties, we had a great time at the competition and look forward to participating in the next ACC.
AS Tampere