We met up for an earlier morning than yesterday at 9:00 and headed over to Rotterdam Centraal train station for our trip to Inholland University. After a quick train ride and a short walk, we were there at the College of Applied Sciences at Inholland’s Delft campus. We met with our two guides for the day who are students from the university, one from Holland and the other was from Germany and is studying here.
We headed to a classroom where some staff members from the university explained to us exactly what the aeronautical engineering major focuses on. Though I am not an engineering student, and a lot of the concepts that were discussed were rather foreign to me, I did appreciate what was said to the longest extent that I could. I found one particular infographic rather interesting:
Seeing the way that aeronautics has improved so quickly since the Wright Brothers’ first flight in the early 1900s. I was particularly interested, probably because of that business major mindset, in the right side of the infographic. The idea that entire aviation infrastructure could eventually be run on electric planes rather than on fuel was not really an idea that had crossed my mind. That being said, now that it has, I feel that this could be the future of aeronautics. In the interest of sustainability, I look forward to the advancements in clean fuel sources as well as the continued use of batteries to revolutionize an industry that had seen little consumer-sided improvements in the last few decades.
We had a quick lunch, provided by the kind faculty at the university, and then headed to see a very interesting flight simulator. Though the technology does exist in some forms already, this was one of the more complex ones I have seen, and one of the designers, a student at Inholland-Delft, explained that there was one time where the ‘plane’ actually had dual engine failure after he forgot to release the oil pressure. This shows just how advanced these simulators can be and how important they will become in the training of new pilots.
We had another meeting with a very interesting gentleman who was working on a satellite that could help aviators to navigate and communicate while they are in the air. He showed us his prototype for the satellite, which of course was on a much smaller scale as the real thing will cost roughly €2 million to create and launch. He explained their plans for a 2027 launch after the funding and manufacturing has completed, and we wished him good luck as we headed off to our last activity at Inholland, plane crafting!
Our group made the plane that got second place in our friendly competition (we were snubbed!), but the experience is really what counts. Our plane used more weight than any of the others but was also incredibly reinforced with a combination of duct tape, scotch tape, and additional cardboard to ensure it would still work when it fell but could still fly a long distance. We outperformed all the other teams in the flight competition, but when it came down to design, another time took the cake, though their design was much more simplistic than ours.
After the competition, our amazing trip advisors, Frank and Dr. Bursic, gifted us with some delicious Freakshakes – yes that’s the real name – and even a photo cannot justice as to how great they were. We finished our shakes quickly before running over to our canal tour of Delft where we saw many beautiful bridges and homes, and learned more about the historic city. Overall, a great day here in the Netherlands!
