Have you ever dreamed of building your own airplane?
“Try, fail, retry… and then succeed. Unless it crashes again.” With these words, Daniel perfectly sums up the essence of his project: Polaris. Not just a childhood dream, but a real engineering challenge. While other kids his age build model planes, he decided to construct a real aircraft with his own hands.
Since he was a child, Daniel has always dreamed of flying. His ambition? To become a pilot. But before sitting in the cockpit of a real aircraft, he chose to build one from scratch. This is how the Polaris Project was born—a bush plane with a taildragger setup and dihedral wings, designed to ensure greater stability in flight. A challenge far from simple.
To ensure stability, Daniel chose to build a bushcraft with a taildragger setup and wings featuring dihedral angles at the tips, allowing the plane to maintain its trajectory without constant pilot corrections. The theory seemed solid, but in practice, the challenges were plenty.
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The first test flights of Polaris V1 were a series of obstacles. The main issue? Lack of thrust. “I crashed it a million times,” Daniel laughs, “and every time I had to repair it, day after day.” Entire weekends spent soldering, fixing components, and perfecting the design. Many times, he thought about giving up, abandoning everything. But every mistake pushed him to improve and try again.
A key factor in his journey was the support of H-FARM International School. His physics lessons with Professor Vaitopoulos gave him the foundation to calculate the glide ratio and the minimum thrust needed for takeoff, while Professor Ammer introduced him to Arduinos, which he used to implement a lighting system on the aircraft.
Daniel, MYP Student
“Without these skills, the project would never have taken off—at least not literally!”
But more than just an airplane, Polaris is a testament to perseverance. “Without failure, there is no success,” he says confidently. The Polaris Project proves that with passion, dedication, and the right amount of determination, even the most ambitious dreams can take flight.
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