On Friday 3 July we (that is Joe Cooper, Cameron Draper, Nundon Vaghadia and myself) attended the Glider Challenge at MBDA in Stevenage, along with Mrs Townhill and Mr James.

Shortly after we had arrived at MBDA we were given a name tag and asked to sit down at the table labelled “Nobel”. It was here where we were told a little bit about MBDA and also the plan for the day. After our introduction we were given a tour of MBDA’s missile testing facilities. I was fascinated by the ginormous machine they used to simulate a missile’s journey. We were then given 3 interactive lectures (aerodynamics, materials and business) to help us understand what we needed for our gliders.

Our team of 4 started the glider challenge by considering the different ways we could make our glider successfully fly. We eventually decided on a simple design for our glider that hopefully would fly for quite a long time. We built the glider with this idea in mind and once the glue had dried we tested our glider. Our test results were extremely positive which made us feel quite confident that our glider would do well.

Sadly, we did not manage to get our glider to fly as far as some of the other schools did, however we were still very happy with our respectable distance of 8.5 meters. Although we did not win any of the awards all four of us can definitely say that we enjoyed the competition and would attempt it again if given the chance.

Daniel Robson