After the throttle and landing gear tests, the geese were shooed away and Genii was a go for flight.
It trundled down the model airplane runway at Mann Lake and quickly lifted into the air, circling high and higher above the surrounding fields.
Despite its lovely name, Genii is not a lovely plane; it is the pasty white color of a mushroom, and its stubby, cigar-shaped body is attached to the tail section with a pole-like connection.
Nevertheless, after nearly a year of design and fabrication work, it is a thing of beauty to the WSU engineering students who built it and who gathered to watch it soar.
"University students aren't supposed to be able to do what you're doing," Washington State University professor Jacob Leachman told the group after the successful test flight. "Great job as a team. Everybody found a niche, everybody contributed. You're starting to get people's attention."
Leachman, a hydrogen fuel specialist and 2001 Lewiston High School graduate, teaches at the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. He has been advising students on this project, which received $20,000 in startup funding from WSU last year.
Genii was originally expected to be an intermediate step, a small-scale prototype used to check the parts and components needed to build a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) plane - an unmanned drone capable of reaching 65,000 feet and staying there for a week or more without needing to refuel.
Somewhere along the way, though, it turned into a project in its own right. Private companies see Genii as a suitable vehicle for testing their own concepts and systems - at a much lower altitude and lower cost than a full-scale HALE plane.
"We'll go to a HALE plane if someone is ready to pay for it, but so far we haven't found that person," Leachman said. "But there's a good niche just for what you saw today (with Genii)."
The plane is about 10 feet long and has an 18-foot wingspan. Its hollow body and fully loaded design weight of 55 pounds make it a suitable platform for flight testing various technologies.
Representatives of Aerojet, for example, an aerospace and defense manufacturing firm, are talking with the group about using Genii to test a power system it's developing. Leachman said there's also interest in having the group design other vehicles, such as rockets or helicopters, that use Genii's own unique power system.
The plane runs on battery power, but the goal is to covert to a fuel cell power system in the coming months. The system will initially be run on gaseous hydrogen, then liquid hydrogen.
"A year ago, (Genii) was just a concept. Now we're doing test flights," said Patrick Adam, a former Boeing engineer and one of two doctoral students, two recent graduates and about a half-dozen undergraduates who designed the plane, manufactured the parts and constructed the computer, electronics and power systems needed to fly and control it.
The next step, he said, is to remove the battery system and install a high-pressure gaseous hydrogen tank. The gas will flow into a fuel cell and produce the electricity needed to power the propeller motor and onboard electronics.
Eventually they'll switch to liquid hydrogen because it's a more compact form of fuel, allowing greater endurance for the same weight.
Eli Shoemake, president of WSU's Aerospace Club and one of the Genii team members, said the plane's name comes from the Latin for "pondus hydrogenii" or pH, which translates as the power or amount of hydrogen.
"While pH helps quantify how acidic or basic a substance is, it's a measure of hydrogen ion activity," Shoemake said. "We felt this reference to the power of hydrogen was a fitting title for our aircraft, as it will be running off the power of hydrogen."
Once they hydrogen tank is installed, he said, the Federal Aviation Administration won't let the group test fly Genii at Mann Lake. Aerojet may let them use a test facility in Kentucky, but there's also talk of using NASA's Dryden Flight Research facility at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Although Boeing and other manufacturers are working on large-scale UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles, Leachman said the only comparable vehicle to Genii that he's aware of is the Ion Tiger, which was built by the Office of Naval Research.
"I don't know what their budget was, but it wasn't $20,000," he said. "With another $100,000 in funding, we could easily go after the UAV endurance record of two-day flight. We're that close, just with the vehicle we have now.
"That's the real advantage of being at a university: Every dollar goes into research and into training students. It's the biggest bang for the buck."
Flight test videos and other information about Genii can be found at http://wsuuas.tumblr.com/.
---
Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208) 791-9168.
