Why DARPA Should Fund Master RC Modelers to Build Prototypes
The other day, I was talking to a master modeler who dealt with remote-controlled aircraft, he is a hobbyist working out of his garage creating some really spectacular new designs, and also replicas of previous famous aircraft in American history. Interestingly enough, for him to make these replicas fly, he has to often redesign and tinker with the plans and designs. Often he has to change the control surfaces, deal with stability issues, rebalance the aircraft, and modify the components. Okay so, I would like to talk to you about this for a moment if I might.
You see, he may just be a hobbyist, but he has valuable insight into aerospace design and engineering. In fact if you think about it he is operating in the applied sciences arena of engineering. He is creating prototypes, often they crash and burn, but just like DARPA for instance, it is high risk, high gain. What he learns he usually shares with other RC modelers, and he shared some of his knowledge with me. I've always said that we should take all of the former "vertical takeoff and landing" or VTOL designs of the past, and now that we have new materials, we should build them in the present, fly them, and see what we learn.
Yes, I would submit to you that many of these aircraft which had crashed and burned as prototypes, may flight today as RC models, and be perfect for micro air vehicles or unmanned aerial vehicles in the battlespace. These older designs are quite awesome, and perhaps they didn't fly at the time due to weight, or materials of the day, but now all that has changed thanks to carbon composites, and the next round of carbon nano-tubes, with graphene coatings. It seems to me there are so many awesome designs coming out of aerospace engineering schools around the country, so many great designs and artists renderings, but we never do anything about it.
At minimum, we should find all of these garage innovators and RC modelers and have them match the artists renderings and the best designs put forth by engineering students, professors, and those in the private sector and build them as remote-controlled model airplanes. Let's see if they work, and each time we do, we will learn more and more, and then we should pay people to write up what has been learned, and have these folks who are building the aircraft record it step-by-step using their iPad taking digital pictures, and sound videos explaining it all.
These modelers are already building these airplanes. So why not fund them the cost to build the aircraft, what would it cost, $1000 per design? After it's written up, let them keep the model after it's been videotaped, recorded, and we have the prototype pictures, and building process digitized. Imagine what we can learn, imagine the increased RC modeler group of people out there who would be dedicated to the cost to advancing aerospace engineering and science.
Not only that, it would make it fun for the next generation, this is a cool idea, and we should do it right away and establish a fund, it wouldn't even cost that much, but the benefits would be astronomical, and hyperbolic because the more we learn, and the more we build, and the more we crash these things, fix the problems and go again, the quicker in rapid succession we can advance the future of aeronautics. I don't want to hear any excuses, just do this.
There's no reason we can't. We must advance the future of America, and there is no excuse not to do it right here and right now, today. Get it done.
