This year’s Design Build Fly team finished 25th out of 107 teams in the annual American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics DBF flight competition in Wichita, Kansas. The team’s president attributes the success to a combination of two main efforts—one technical and one psychological—while keeping to a strict schedule.
“This year, we hit the ground running. The rules came out after Labor Day and we built a prototype within two weeks of that,” said aerospace engineering senior and DBF President Michal Marciniak.
Over the course of the year, the team built four planes. The first prototype couldn't hold passengers but had the shape to be able to hold them. They built a second prototype last fall.
“That one unfortunately crashed after multiple flight tests, but we learned from our mistakes,” Marciniak said.
A third plane was more refined for the mission systems design. And the fourth was the competition aircraft where final fixes were done and a careful monokote job so it also looked good on the outside.
This year’s AIAA objective was to design and build a remote-controlled plane for urban air mobility purposes. For the ground mission, the team was timed while loading a medical supply cabinet as cargo, two EMTs, and a passenger on a gurney onto the plane. There were also three flight missions.
“The first flight mission was with just the crew in the cockpit. That went really well. It was an easy takeoff, a smooth landing, and we met the 20-foot takeoff requirement. That one was easy because the plane was empty on the inside, making it lightweight,” Marciniak said.
Building a lightweight aircraft was the team’s primary technical goal.
“Every pound or half a pound we could lose on the structural weight, we could add in the medical supply cabinet or passengers. One thing we changed was to build with plywood trussing as opposed to balsa wood which requires more bulkheads and structure inside the plane. Switching to plywood sheeting for a trussing allows for easier build and fewer redundant structural features.”
Marciniak said the team was fortunate to have Stephanie Dutra, who graduated this past December, as the design lead and vice president for the fall semester.
“She kept telling the team, ‘My design says it has to be X weight.’ We’d weigh every part and make sure it came in within that weight. We still overbuilt it a bit, but the testing and plywood truss allowed us to minimize the weight and have a stronger aircraft.”
Marciniak realized there was more to the team’s success than just excellent technical skills.
“Another big effort this year was to not just build a plane but to build the team’s confidence in their ability to build a more lightweight plane, which we needed for this mission,” he said. When their second prototype crashed, he said morale was low.
“Hearing that the plane crashed impacted us all. A lot of time and effort goes into each build. However, I knew that we still had lots of time until competition and we got a lot of data from the second prototype during previous flight tests.”
Last year, Marciniak was the team’s treasurer. The year before, he was part of the build team. Although, he said building is where his heart is, as president this year went on emergency shopping trips and had to do more project management.
“I visited the sub teams, attended CAD sessions and build sessions and helped out wherever I was needed. Once, during the build of our first prototype, our build lead Jessy Singh called and said there was something missing. So, I stopped what I'm doing and went to Home Depot to buy more epoxy. It was a lot of that.
“But a big part of my job, too, was making sure the team built the prototypes on a strict schedule. There was a lot of coordination with flight tests, Professor Merret’s availability to pilot the plane, and the weather.”
The competition in Wichita had the largest-ever flyoff participation, with more than a thousand students on 93 university teams from 12 countries, including 32 states in the U.S. Because of the size of the event, Marciniak and team member Nicole Ornoff decided to make an effort to form collaborations.
“We wanted the team to make friends, to network and thought we’d start with the other Big 10 schools,” Marciniak said. “We said we could help them if they needed it and we could ask them for help. We went to dinner with Penn State last year and this year, so they were on board. Purdue thought it was a great idea. In the Textron hangar, we looped around and found Maryland and Michigan. Nicole made a group chat and coordinated a photo of all five teams together.”
Marciniak graduated this month and accepted a job at United Airlines in Houston, but he believes the DBF team is in a great position to do well next year.
“We've been growing rapidly. The year before last we didn't go to the competition. Last year’s goal was to go and compete. Did that. I had to continue the momentum, so our goal this year was to complete all four missions, which we accomplished. Next year the big goal is to be in the top 10.
“Recruitment was something I worked on this year and it will need a big effort next year to get first-year students to join who can continue with the club for the next four years. With only two seniors graduating this year, me and Jessy, it’ll be a strong team next year.”
Design Build Fly is a registered student organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It is open to anyone interested in building aircraft, but its members are largely students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.