Cool Aeronautics Online
A Cool Aeronautics event took place on 14 July with the participation of Ashover Primary School Year 6 and four Rolls-Royce employees, also members of the RAeS.
Due to the Covid-19 restrictions still in place at the time, it was decided that the safest option was to hold an online event, rather than a face-to-face one as we did in the past.
It was relatively easy to prepare for the event, as we had some useful material from the previous Cool Aeronautics that could still be used, although it had to be adapted for a virtual talk. At the same time we had to accept that we couldn’t share with the kids other interesting and funny experiences, such as live wind tunnel and 3D printing demonstrations and the balsa wood gliders competition that has always been the highlight of the Cool Aeronautics event.
We started the day with a very interesting talk on the ‘History of Aeronautics’ from Tony Razzell, materials expert with more than 30 years’ experience at Rolls-Royce. Tony told the kids about the evolution of aircraft, from the very first Wright brothers’ Flyer to the more recent and modern Concorde and Airbus A380.
Then it was the turn of Amina Dalton to talk on ‘How Aircraft work’. Amina is a brilliant apprentice at Rolls-Royce and she focused her talk on the different flight phases, explaining to the kids what happens during each of them; she also talked of the main aircraft manoeuvres.
While the first two talks had also been delivered at previous events, the third was a brand new one, purposely tailored to the virtual event, to make up for the loss of live wind-tunnel experience. Jayanth Venkatesh, noise engineer at Rolls-Royce, talked of the importance of wind-tunnel testing, showing how they’re made and all the different applications they could be used for. He also talked about the importance of CFD and how it can be used, together with experiments, to better understand the behaviour of a certain component.
Jayanth also used the online NASA aerofoil simulator to show the kids what the parameters of interest are when looking at the flow over an aerofoil and how changing its shape affects its performance.
Tony, Amina and Jayanth did a great job, delivering high-quality and interactive talks that kept the kids interested and engaged all the time, as could be seen by the many questions they asked.
The highlight of the morning was the paper plane competition, substituting the gliders competition. We had coloured paper and pens and different paper plane models delivered to the class a few days before the event and Sharon Hallsworth, the teacher, said the children enjoyed selecting the paper and trying out the different designs. She built up an amazing runway in the school hall that was used for the competition. All the kids had two attempts at launching their planes, and then the best ten were chosen for the final, where the winner launched his ‘basic dart’ as far as 11m!
I can say it was a big success and afterwards the whole class had a lot of questions for us about the plane designs, their functioning and what they could have done differently to get a better performance; they also had questions on our jobs and what made us decide to study engineering.
At the end of the day the teacher gave the kids the RAeS flying badges and the 3D printed aerofoil name tags, kindly made by Tony, which were, quoting Sharon, “the icing on the cake – the children were really excited!”
Surely it would have been great to hold the Cool Aeronautics in person, as it is the kind of event that makes everyone, children and organisers, excited and happy. We always had a good laugh and it is great to interact with the kids, as this is what makes it a unique experience. However, everyone agreed that, although it is not the same, the virtual event went great: organisation was really smooth, no IT issues on the day and, most important, the children were very engaged and had a lot of fun! We all hope that it will be possible to have the next Cool Aeronautics in person but, in the meantime, we are really happy we managed to deliver a good quality virtual event too.
Francesca Guardavaccaro
AMRAeS