The DBF at UCLA team placed 10th out of 112 teams with this year’s aircraft “Bell-Air”, achieving their best ever result. Their design report, an important scoring measure detailing the club’s engineering process and design workflows throughout the year, placed 2nd and will be published on the AIAA website.
AIAA Design Build Fly is an annual engineering competition where university students design and build RC-aircraft capable of carrying out a series of flight missions. The mission requirements change year by year, allowing students to gain experience optimizing for ever-changing mission parameters, including payload capacity, speed, efficiency, and a variety of different mechanisms. This year, the flight missions were modeled off of the X-1 Supersonic Flight Program, with each aircraft needing to carry a minimum of two fuel tanks and an X-1 test glider, which deploys from the aircraft mid-flight and lands in a designated area.
