Students at the University of Maryland are vying to win a Sikorsky challenge with a giant helicopter that barely works.
The 115-foot Gamera II can fly for a little longer than 60 seconds and has reached a height of 2.9 meters (9.4 feet).
Not impressed? The Gamera is actually heartbreakingly close to achieving the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize, a modest sounding engineering contest that has gone 33 years without being claimed. To win the prize, a human-powered helicopter must fly to a height of at least 3 meters and hover at this height for 60 seconds. The helicopter must also stay within a 10-meter square for the duration of the flight.
The Maryland team is close. The Gamera, made of foam, some bike chains and lots of glue, currently holds the world record for longest human-powered helicopter flight. And while the helicopter is just shy of reaching the 3 meter mark, keeping it in place during flight is still a challenge. The team only recently added a control system to the craft, which allows the pilot to steer the ungainly, fragile helicopter, which had been drifting off course inside the gym where it’s tested.
The three pilots of Gamera all weigh about 120 pounds, keeping the helicopter super light. The Gamera itself weighs about 80 pounds.
“Once the tests get much over 30 or 40 seconds or so, they definitely can get pretty tiring,” Duncan Enerson, a 19-year-old freshman, told the Washington Post. “Anything past that, like once you to like 50-, 60-second flights, after that, you’re just kind of, flat out, you’re just done.”
Enerson, his twin brother Henry and Colin Gore, a graduate student, fly the helicopter using both hand and foot pedals. Flying the craft is taxing, and all three want to pilot the prize-winning flight. “You want to be the one to be able to say I got the world record,” Enerson said.
“Almost all of our colleagues, everyone in our industry said that was not possible, not feasible,” faculty advisor Inder Chopra told the Washington Post. “Now it looks like people think it is feasible.”
Check out the video below for the Gamera’s world -record-setting 50-second flight in June, featuring pilot Kyle Gluesenkamp and some very brave research assistants.
