A Model Mission

Abstract

This article illustrates details of Maynard Hill, an experimenter, who sent a man in the air on a 600-pound flying machine. He continued to build models throughout high school, during his World War II Navy aviation service, and during his years at Penn State, where he received degrees in metallurgy in 1950 and 1951. Vacuum tube radio made flight control complicated. Hill said he struggled for two years before he achieved a marginally successful flight with a descending glider by means of stepping the rudder position. Hill's plan was to begin the flight under manual radio control, transfer to autopilot for the ocean portion, and then back to radio control for landing by another team waiting in Ireland. The autopilot weighed only a few ounces. It was developed by team member Joe Foster. A challenge was performing a smooth transition from manual to autonomous control and then back to manual for landing. The first attempted flight started successfully on radio control, but failed to stabilize when Joe Foster sent the radio signal to transfer control to autonomous flight. They suspected that the airplane was too far out of trim for the transition. He expertly transferred the airplane to his radio control, cut the engine, and guided it to a dead-stick landing near the monument that marks the 1919 landing spot of John Alcock and Arthur Brown.