Earlier this week, the Texas A&M Flight Research Laboratory’s Velocity XL-5-RG all-composite, canard-configuation aircraft returned from painting in Kenedy, TX. The aircraft is now fully ready for flight operations. Next week, the aircraft will begin being actively used as the flight platform for AERO425, the department’s undergraduate flight testing course.
Photos of the completed paint work are shown below:
The FRL’s newest aircraft landed at its homebase for the first time on July 31st, 2006. Click on the movie below to see a fly-by and the first landing of the Velocity at Easterwood Airport (Coming Soon!).
Team members are working on installing more instrumentation in preparation for the start of upcoming air quality measurement missions conducted for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Be sure to check back in a few months for new photos of the Velocity after it has been painted!
Reprinted from the Texas A&M Engineering website.
Originally authored by Lesley Kriewald.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas—Vice chancellor and dean of engineering Dr. G. Kemble Bennett has appointed Dr. William Saric, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, to the Stewart & Stevenson Services Inc. Professorship II in Engineering
Saric was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in February 2006. He joined the Texas A&M Engineering faculty in January 2005 and was previously a professor of aerospace engineering at Arizona State University since 1984. He has also taught at Tohoku University (Japan) and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and previously worked at Sandia National Laboratories.
Saric’s research interests are in the areas of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, focusing on hydrodynamic stability, boundary-layer transition and nonlinear waves. He has recently conducted theoretical, computational, experimental and flight research on stability, transition and control of two-dimensional and three-dimensional boundary layers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), subsonic aircraft, supersonic aircraft and re-entry vehicle applications. He has established the Flight Research Laboratory at A&M with three piloted aircraft and is in the process of re-establishing several major, world-class wind-tunnel facilities on campus.
Saric is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences. He received the AGARD (NATO) Scientific Achievement Award in 1996, the G.I. Taylor Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 1993 and the Fluid Dynamics Award from AIAA in 2003.
Saric holds a B.S. from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a M.S. from the University of New Mexico, both in Mechanical Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1968.
Click on the movie below to hear an overview of the project:
