Event part of Engineering Week
An Apache-AH 64 helicopter landed on the field at the Solomon Blatt Physical Education Center Wednesday as part of Engineering Week.
Deborah Glenn and Adam Miracle, two active members of the National Guard, landed the craft. Other National Guard members were also available to answer student and faculty questions.
The purpose, they said, was to allow students in tangent with the McEntire Joint National Guard Base to work on fatigue testing on the main rotor swashplate, the tail rotor and the drive shaft.
For those students unfamiliar with helicopter terminology, the swashplate is the part of the helicopter that translates the input via the flight controls into the motion of the main rotor blades, creating part of the equation, in conjugation with the tail rotor, for flight.
Engineering Week is a set of events run by the National Engineer Week Foundation in order to “strive to be the global leader in cultivating and celebrating the engineering profession.”
Both the foundation and the university hold that is necessary to persuade young students to become excited about engineering in order to create a generation of students prepared to work toward a greater future.
Cindy Buckhault, an employee of the engineering and computing department, noted that the new dean of the program wanted to see a larger contribution to the Engineering Week this year than had been done in the past. Each day, one large event and one “lunch and learn” among numerous other activities have been scheduled.
“We have scheduled events geared toward both the college-aged students and those in K-12 in order to display what engineers do and more about computing,” Buckhault said.
USC is one of only three facilities in the U.S. that researches condition and base management of the drive trains of Apache and Black Hawk helicopters.
For more information on events available through the university’s Engineering week, check out www.engr.sc.edu/eweek.