5/14/2025 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
This year’s AIAA Design, Build, Fly competition challenge involved flying, not one, but two airplanes. The Illinois team affectionately named them Tom and Jerry. Tom, the larger carrier vehicle, had to fly with at least two fuel tanks and its spunky little sidekick, Jerry, onboard. Jerry represented an X-1 supersonic flight test vehicle that had to be dropped from Tom in flight, stabilize, spiral and land in a bonus box.
“The big debate this year was whether or not you should have a control system on the X-1 glider,” said DBF President and Team Lead Nicole Orloff. “We decided our focus would be on trimming the glider for free flight and dropping it as many times as we could. We practiced that a lot. We wanted to verify that we could do it without a fancy control system.”
Orloff said they scored well on the written proposal, which was due last October, but going into the competition, their final design report only landed them in the middle of the pack—48th out of 112 teams. This meant, to improve on their performance from last year in the contest, they’d need to complete all the missions, including successfully dropping the X-1.
“Our mission systems team, Tyler Gralewski and Katie Lee, rocked it,” she said. “They developed a drop system where our X-1 glider slots into bottom of the fuselage. The drop mechanism has a weighted door. There's a rubber band that sits on top, and the glider is held in with just a pin from a servo. As soon as you pull the servo pin, the rubber band drops straight out the bottom. It worked well.”
Not leaving anything to chance, the team took one of last year’s prototypes out to the field for flight testing every weekend beginning last November. At the competition, it paid off.
“We saw so many teams struggling. Their biggest pain point was getting the glider to release, transition to a stable flight, and do the 180-degree turn. A lot of the teams at competition hadn't even dropped their X-1 gliders until the week before competition. It made me appreciate all the times I had the team out at the field at six o'clock in the morning on Saturdays dropping that glider because we were the first team to hit the two and a half extra bonus points on mission three. All that dedication. It was just awesome.”
Orloff said being placed at 48 carried with it at least one advantage. Tech inspections on the first day of the competition are open, so they were able to observe why some of the teams failed. She explained that every open hole larger than one-quarter inch had to be covered in some way. And the inspectors were meticulously measuring the holes.
“We had laser cut everything but realized we may have some tolerance issues that would be safer to fix than risk a bad inspection.”
Because their number in the flight order hadn’t been called that first day, they were able to spend the evening back at the hotel doing repairs.
“Tyler crushed balsa wood and glued it into the holes. Then he used a drill, smaller than a quarter inch, to drill a primer hole. He tapped it and drilled out a hole that was exactly a quarter inch.
“The inspection went smoothly. It only took 40 minutes and was well worth the Thursday night effort.”
Orloff, who is graduating this month, joined Design Build Fly at the end of her first year at Illinois. She participated in a series of progressively stronger years of competition. Last year, with Michal Marciniak as president, the team finished 25th out of 107 teams. This year, they rose to 17th out of 112 teams.
Shirley Shah was president the first two years Orloff was involved.
“Shirley did a better job than I did of teaching while learning. In the fall semester of senior design, Professor Merret teaches us the fundamentals, but you really learn by doing it and it’s our responsibility to teach the younger students on the team. Shirley made it work. This team would not be where it is without her leadership,” Orloff said.
Orloff knew going into it that serving as president of DBF as well as leading the design subteam would be a lot of work, but she takes seriously her leadership commitment.
“That's one thing I get on my soapbox with engineering first-year students. They have a lot of questions about how to get leadership positions and internships. I tell them, in every facet of life, if you agree to doing something, you better make sure you do it. If you don’t, people are not going to respect you, and they're not going to trust you to do your job.
“It’s all about how motivated you are to do it. For me, I will find a way. I may not get as much sleep this week or get to do fun things. But I'm doing it for my team, too. It’s hard. We’re not perfect, but we get better at our time management skills. And, even in the cases where it feels like I just don't have enough time in the week, we all just make it work.”
Next year, Katie Lee will lead DBF as president.
“This year we focused on designing and manufacturing an airplane that would fly,” Orloff said. “With what we know now, we could whip out an aircraft in a month. It has been a long-term process to get where we are now. We’re in a better spot now to break the top 10 next year. The team knows how to improve its spring design report score. I have faith in them and with Katie as president, it’ll be great.”
This past year’s team assignments were as follows:
Nicole Orloff was the team lead as well design subteam lead. On that subteam, Orloff was also responsible for design, aircraft sizing, score analysis, propulsion and performance. Additional members of the design subteam were: Justin Abel on stability and control; Aidan Menees on aerodynamics; and Junyi “Joey” Cao on flight test.
Sebastian Serratos was the manufacturing subteam lead. On his subteam were: mechanical engineering student Ian Chroniak on CAD; Tyler Gralewski on the build; Katie Lee on mission systems; and Adam Mateja on flight integration.
The team benefited from their faculty advisor Professor Jason Merret and graduate student mentors Aidan Molloy, Elias Waddington and Sam Hince.