The Great Helicopter Drop-Off

The great helicopter drop-off was held on March 3, 2004. Four teams of undergraduates from MA 3627 (Team Win, Team Best, Red Hawks, and Sleep-Deprived), one team of grad students from MA 544 (Grads) and Erik Erhardt, MA 544 champion from 2002, participated. Erik entered two copters: the 2002 champion whirly bird and his revolutionary nano-copter. Three drops were done by each team from the fourth (top) level of Fuller labs and another three from the third level (except that Erik did only two drops from each level because he and the grads arrived late and I was getting tired). The data are found in sasdata.copters (pc sas only).

A two-way model with team and height as factors was fit to the data. Interaction was found to be nonsignificant, while both team and height were highly significant. Tukey multiple pairwise comparisons revealed that Erik's 2002 champion chopper was significantly better (.05 overall significance level) than all copters except the nano-copter, to which it was statistically equivalent. The nano-copter in turn was significantly equivalent to Team Win and Team Best, but significantly better than Grads, Red Hawks and Sleep-Deprived. Team Win and Team Best were statistically equivalent to each other and to Grads, and were superior to Red Hawks and Sleep-Deprived, while Grads was statistically equivalent to Red Hawks and superior to Sleep-Deprived.

Congratulations, Erik, you are still the champ. Also congratulations, Team Win and Team Best. You are the co-champions of MA 3627. To Sleep-Deprived, we can only suggest: get some shut-eye!


Joe Petruccelli < jdp@wpi.edu>
Last modified: Wed Mar 3 17:39:31 EST 2004