10/21/2025 Debra Levey Larson
Aerospace senior design teams consistently place at the top in the annual AIAA competition. This year they took home 1st and 2nd place.
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Every year there is a different challenge and unique requirements for the Undergraduate Team Aircraft Design Competition hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace. Senior design teams from The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign consistently place at the top, and this year was no different. Homelander took 1st and QF-49 Dragonfly placed 2nd.
This year’s assignment was to design a small, high-performance but low-cost homeland defense interceptor to replace the stealthy F-22 and F-35 as they expected to reach the end of their service life by 2045.
For both teams, the three most difficult aspects were minimizing the cost, hitting the instantaneous turn rate requirement and finding the best locations on the aircraft for fuel storage.
Homelander team lead, Zach Baker, said they knew from the beginning that cost would be challenging.
“What fighter jet is below $25 million, especially by today’s standards,” Baker said. “We started by picking a reference aircraft with a relatively low cost and sourced off-the-shelf products to meet the budget.”
He said they also kept the aircraft as small as possible and were careful when considering materials.
“When we were going through the cost equations, materials factored in the most, especially the manufacturing. We used mostly aluminum, but titanium, where it needed to be to handle hotter temperatures around the engine. And we used stronger materials at areas where the wing met the fuselage and other joined areas where you're going to have a lot of stress.”
Madi Whitlock led the team that designed QF-49 Dragonfly.
“We addressed the challenges by focusing on having a solid starting point before getting into the details,” Whitlock said. “We ended with a really detailed sizing code and were not afraid to put in the work to make major changes late in the game when the instantaneous turn rate became a major problem.
Homelander’s aerodynamics and configuration team lead, Aidan Menees, agreed. At 18 degrees per second, the instantaneous turn rate was a difficult constraint.
“We solved that by trying to get as much lift from the wing as possible,” Menees said. “Slats on the leading edge of the wing automatically deploy at high angles of attack to delay stall so we can maximize the lift coefficient.”
His heavy involvement with wing design meant Menees had to design around two other requirements—a four-hour loiter and a supersonic dash. Designing for both was tricky.
“A supersonic dash is important for an interceptor because you can meet a threat farther away and minimize the damage it could cause so we decided to increase the dash speed to Mach 2 over the required Mach 1.6, Menees said. “The only aircraft I know that can do both high and low speeds are the F-14 and B-1 because they have wings that can change their sweep. The team decided early on that variable sweep wings would likely be too heavy and costly. Instead, we focused on double delta wing designs that have higher sweep inboard than outboard and has benefits at low and high speeds.”
Menees found that they could set the two sweeps to control when parts of the wing are in supersonic and subsonic flow. This led to a unique design where the inner wing section is a subsonic high-efficiency supercritical airfoil, and the outer wing is a supersonic hexagonal airfoil.
Figuring out how to fit 14 thousand pounds of fuel into the aircraft was one of the biggest design challenges throughout the entire semester for all the teams that competed.
Sebastian River Morales, mass properties, systems and ordnance team lead for Homelander, said they addressed it by opting for an internal weapons bay for the drag benefits, which took up a substantial amount of internal volume from the fuselage.
“Due to cost and other requirements, we couldn't just make Homelander larger, so it took careful designing to find the maximum usable internal volume, along with external, conformal tanks to meet the mission requirements,” Morales said. “Having removable external tanks also allowed us to reduce weight and increase performance for the missions that didn’t require as much fuel.”
Baker said he enjoys being in a leadership role. He has served on executive boards for several clubs and was president of a club basketball team.
“I just call on everyone to be self-governing,” Baker said. “You have your specific stuff to do, but if you have a problem, say it. Nobody fixes problems by keeping silent and there’s no shame in a group chat, to say ‘Hey, I need help on this.’ And constant communication. I always made sure we had two meetings a week and the group chat was always flooded with back-and-forth conversations followed by a lot of phone calls.”
Baker said he began every team meeting and every team email by talking about putting in the work to win.
“It’s about how you set the tone from the start. When I was coaching club basketball, I said we’re the best and we’re going to put in the work to do it. The first year, we ended up winning our regional tournament and going to nationals.”
Although Baker has led a lot of athletics and other clubs, he said he’d never had leadership experience communicating technical information.
“That’s something I discussed with Professor Merret a lot—about being a technical leader rather than a personnel leader, because it's not just talking to people and communicating goals, it's also learning how to communicate data and information and relay what’s important. I also encouraged everyone to go talk to Professor Merret. He’s the expert, so we definitely made use of his office hours.”
About Merret’s senior design course, Whitlock said, “Although I didn't realize or appreciate it in the moment, the entirety of the first semester senior design course served as an amazing starting point for the project. In-class lectures gave me a solid base of knowledge in all disciplines and the homework problems were related to what would be our spring project. Professor Merret's ability to explain complex topics with both clarity and depth was incredibly helpful throughout the entire process.”
Baker will graduate in December. He had a co-op at Collins Aerospace last fall and took the first semester of the senior design course online.
“It was tough because I was working for Collins from nine to five every day, then went home and worked on senior design work. I came back to campus in the spring and pushed back my graduation by a semester.
Whitlock earned her B.S. in May and is now a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. She is currently at The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia.
“I don't know yet what specifically I will be doing when I graduate in April, but I hope to become an air intelligence officer, a low altitude air defense officer or fly MV-22 Ospreys CH-53s or KC-130s.”
Team members and their roles for Homelander included Zach Baker, team lead and interior design; Alex Hausser, stability and control and avionics; Yair Guerrero, structures, repair and maintenance; Zayna Khan, loads and dynamics and certification; Aidan Menees, aerodynamics, configuration and survivability; Vansh Jain, performance and cost analysis; Darwin Maco, propulsion and landing gear; and Sebastian Rivera Morales, mass properties, systems and ordnance.
Team members and their roles on their QF-49 Dragonfly included Madison Whitlock, team lead, systems and avionics; Josh Loeh, performance, cost and ordnance; Josh Gierut, aerodynamics and landing gear; Thomas Folan, stability and control and configuration; Simon Rodriguez, propulsion and survivability; Nicole Artemyev, mass properties and certification; Maggie Ni, structures and interior design; and Alden Yasuda, loads and dynamics, repair and maintenance.