An 18-pound concrete airplane recently made aeronautical history by being the second known concrete plane to fly and the only one to stay intact upon landing.
RAPID CITY, S.D.
An 18-pound concrete airplane recently made aeronautical history by being the second known concrete plane to fly and the only one to stay intact upon landing.
The flight was quick and wobbly with the landing equally erratic, but it was enough for the record books.
“Ours flew and sustained some damage on landing but was not destroyed. So, you could say this is the first concrete airplane to fly and land,” said Marion R Hansen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and an expert in concrete design.
The plane, with a wingspan of 40 inches, was designed and built entirely by three SDSM&T seniors who recently graduated. David Haberman and Tyler Pojanowski, both mechanical engineering majors, and Seth Adams, a civil and environmental engineering major, worked on the plane for a year as part of their senior design project. Hansen and Lidvin Kjerengtroen, Ph.D., advised them throughout. The group had just one shot to test a year’s worth of work.
Watching the concrete plane taxi 200 feet along the runway at the Central States Fairgrounds was a bit unnerving, said Pojanowski.
The plane, made with carbon fiber reinforcement, sustained a crack in the fuselage and wing but otherwise remained intact, thanks in part to the students’ design plans and decision to reinforce the concrete to a safety factor of two, which meant it was twice as strong as it needed to be.
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