Design And Flight Testing Of An In Flight Deployable Parachute System For A Small Unmanned Aerial System (Suas)

Students in the Freshman Spring 2008 design course were challenged to engineer a deployable parachute system for a model aircraft that could be used on a small Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) platform. The primary design requirement of the project was the need for the parachute system to be able to deploy in the event of communications malfunction, loss of control or any other critical failure that could impact the safety of persons or property on the ground. Project requirements stipulated that the design focused primarily on safe, successful recovery of the given airframe. Team members were given the opportunity to suggest alternative materials or changes in design that may yield increased performance benefits for future prototypes. Students utilized a model Piper Cub and were able to meet the minimum design specifications articulated by the customers. The aircraft would fly with a suitable center of gravity (CG) and could manually deploy the parachute while killing power to the model aircraft’s electric motor. This paper discusses group dynamics and leadership as applied to a freshman engineering design project solution.