Abstract
Production of a glider for the birdman rally contests is effective education for university students. However, designoptimization is difficult so that pre-flight test is hard and a large number of design parameters. In order to optimize thedesign of gliders, flight simulations and genetic optimizations were conducted. The numerical results were in goodagreement with results of the real flight. The population size in the present study was set to 200, the evolution was computedfor 50 generations. The essential design variables of the airplane for the contest were obtained with GA. The simulator wassuggested the optimized model with flexible wing that was not sensitive to flight conditions. The proposed model got thefourth prize and the referee's award of the birdman rally contest 2005. It revealed that the genetic algorithm and flightsimulator are useful to optimize the glider for the birdman rally contest.
