Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team

We went out flying a few weeks ago (September 8th) with the intent of tuning the autopilot control loops better, since in their current state they were not tuned well enough for autonomous landing. We headed out to the RC field around 3 and shortly got everything together. We had also installed a camera on the vertical stabilizer to finally get some in flight video. For the most part everything was going smoothly until the third flight.

During the third flight shortly after takeoff we began a descent and then both wings suddenly tore off from the fuselage. It is important to note that this occurred under the manual control of the pilot, it should also be noted that the UAV was carrying more weight than we have had in any other flights. We had also previously suspected that the wings might be too weak to handle the weight, and it turns out they were. After the wings tore off, the airplane was still several hundred feet in the air and it quickly went into a dive and plummeted into an open field, thankfully no cows were harmed in the crash. Below are pictures of the carnage…

As you can see from the pictures above the fuselage is completely ruined, as are the wings, but thankfully all of the electronics and the engine survived. We have already begun to search for a new airframe, currently we have not been able to find an aircraft that is more suited for our purpose so we will most likely be purchasing another Sig Kadet and building our own wings in order to make them much stronger and more efficient (by using a different airfoil).

Here is some in-flight video before the airplane crashed…

Click here to download the high quality video.