An abandoned helicopter near the Xfinity Center on campus helps helicopter design students.
There’s a veteran-turned-instructor living on the campus.
Tucked deep in the intimidatingly STEM-related part of the campus, a UH-1H “Huey” helicopter proudly serves as a memorial of military service, but now, a lesson in design.
The helicopter sits along the treeline next to the Manufacturing Building on Regents Drive. Though the spot is a frequented tailgate spot and late-night hangout, the bird has found its place among the academic elite: It’s been assisting graduate students in helicopter design since the state National Guard donated it in 1998.
“We go out and look at it whenever there’s a new crop of grad students working on helicopter design projects,” said William Staruk, a doctoral candidate in the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center.
The program has cared for the Huey for the past 17 years, giving it lots of attention and three paint jobs, most recently in 2009. Today, it proudly sports the state flag’s black, red and yellow, but it’s due for another sprucing up, doctoral candidate Elizabeth Weiner said.
“My goal for this summer is to try to get funding to repaint it, to try and keep people out of it, fix the windows, but it’s a huge investment that the university would have to make,” Weiner said.
The required funding would lie somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, said Weiner, who would like to update the Huey’s security system and repair broken windows that have been smashed by vandals and a tree during a 2012 derecho that hit the campus.
A little worse for wear, the Huey is still a timeless instruction manual. Helicopters usually update technology but not aesthetic, said Staruk. This university’s 1959 Huey is largely identical in look to contemporary Hueys.
“They still have new versions, but it still looks the same,” Staruk said. “If you were to park [the new version] next to [the Huey], you would recognize similarities. You’d be like, ‘Oh, that looks like an angrier version of the cute yellow thing.’”
The Huey on the campus isn’t operational — it’s missing an engine and all of its fluids — but its bones serve a better educational purpose than any online picture or simulation could, Weiner said. Graduate students can sit inside the cockpit, crawl under the body and explore the control panel. Using this firsthand experience, graduate students then create accurate designs that the rotorcraft program submits to the American Helicopter Society’s annual student design competition. The department’s student design team won first place in the AHS Micro Air Vehicle Student Challenge in 2014.
“Maryland does generally very well at these competitions, and since most students don’t get an opportunity to get inside a helicopter very often, having the helicopter out here … is useful for the newer grad students,” Weiner said.
The Huey, officially called an Iroquois, is “the most potent symbol” of the Vietnam War, said Staruk, and it makes cameos in movies such as Apocalypse Now and We Were Soldiers.
“It’s also a symbol of rescue,” said V.T. Nagaraj, a senior research scientist at the rotorcraft center. “So many people would have been so glad to see this. It was the air ambulance.”
The on-campus ‘copter might be more than 50 years old, but it’s still a relevant testament to helicopter design and structure.
“If you see something you recognize, you’re more comfortable with it,” Weiner said. “Keeping something like that giant machine that’s flying in the air looking the same and keeping people comfortable is important.”
