Bradley Schalk
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Hand-Launched Glider — Design, Fabrication & Flight Testing

Led a team through designing a hand-launched glider from scratch, fabricating the physical prototype, and refining its stability and flight performance through iterative testing.

  • Team lead
  • Aerospace design
  • CAD
  • Fabrication
  • Flight testing
  • Design iteration
My role
Team lead — design, CAD, fabrication, and testing
Process
Design → fabricate → test → iterate → measured flight
Launch
Hand-launched from ground level
Best documented flight
179 ft over 6.35 seconds
The fabricated glider prototype resting on a table, showing its triangular delta planform with reinforced taped edges and a raised centre member.
The fabricated glider prototype used for flight testing.
Measured result

Best documented flight

179ft Flight distance
6.35s Flight duration
Groundlevel Launch condition
Process

From geometry to a measured flight

Each stage fed the next — the design changed because of what testing showed.

Step 01

Design

Glider designed from scratch and its geometry developed in CAD.

Step 02

Fabricate

Physical prototype built from the design and prepared for launch.

Step 03

Test

Hand-launched trials flown to see how the glider actually behaved.

Step 04

Iterate

Stability and flight performance refined across repeated test rounds.

Step 05

Measured flight

179 ft over 6.35 seconds, recorded from a ground-level launch.

Overview

Leading a design-build-test project

I served as team lead on this project and designed the glider from scratch, producing the CAD geometry that the build was based on. From there the team fabricated the physical prototype and put it through repeated hand-launched test flights.

The interesting part was the gap between the two. A glider that looks correct in CAD does not necessarily fly well, and the only way to find out what needs to change is to throw it, watch what it does, adjust, and throw it again. We worked through that loop to improve stability and flight performance, and the best documented result was a 179 ft flight lasting 6.35 seconds from a ground-level launch.

Launching from ground level matters for reading that number. There was no elevated release to trade altitude for distance — the flight had to come from the launch itself and from how well the glider held its trim once it was in the air.

CAD

Glider geometry

The design geometry the prototype was built from.

CAD overview of the glider geometry.
Side profile of the glider geometry.
Top view showing the overall triangular planform and centre structure.
Front view showing the wing geometry and centre vertical member.
Fabrication

The built prototype

The physical glider that flew the documented tests.

Fabricated prototype, showing the delta planform and reinforced edges.
Head-on view showing the centre member and the angle set into the wing panels.
Outcome

What I took from it

  • Testing is the design tool. The changes that mattered came from watching real flights, not from staring at the CAD.
  • Stability first, distance second. Getting the glider to fly predictably was what eventually made a long flight possible.
  • Leading a build means keeping the loop short. The faster the team could get from an idea to a thrown prototype, the more we learned per session.
  • Measure it or it did not happen. Recording distance and duration turned opinions about which version flew better into something we could compare.