UCF PLACES FIRST IN NATION, SECOND IN WORLD AT AIAA STUDENT COMPETITION
A team of eight University of Central Florida aerospace engineering students designed, built and flew the best remote-controlled aircraft in the United States in an international competition sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Besting 90 teams that made it to the final round of AIAA’s 2021 Design Build Fly competition, UCF’s aircraft achieved a virtual tie with the winning team from Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering in India, which was given a tie-breaking advantage by contest judges, according to AIAA. Teammates David Silva-Melendez ’21, Harshavardhan Bangaru ’21, Jack Faysash ’21, Dillon Graves ’21, Mariangelo La Rosa ’21, Kyle Ramos ’21, Andrew Schroeder ’21 and Devin Unterreiner ’21, who all received aerospace engineering degrees earlier this year, spent their senior year designing, building, testing and
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flying the aircraft they nicknamed The Knightmobile. The competition entry also served as the team’s senior design capstone project, a requirement for graduation from the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science. AIAA’s Design Build Fly competition provides university students with hands-on aerospace engineering experience and a way to test their skills against teams from around the world. Teams were challenged to create aircrafts with a deployable surveillance subsystem. Because of the pandemic, teams were asked to submit detailed reports as well as videos of their projects in place of an in-person event. Against the 90 other finalists, including schools like Embry-Riddle University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, UCF’s team successfully performed four different missions that tested the aircraft’s ability to take off, fly, remain aerodynamically stable,
perform surveillance, deliver a payload and land flawlessly. This year marks the best result in UCF’s 10-year history competing in AIAA’s Design Build Fly. “From the get-go, we set a winning mentality to place first in the competition,” says team leader Silva-Melendez. “We gave everyone a role to do and attacked the design problem with a divide and conquer mentality. With the pandemic, this year’s competition proved to be extra challenging in terms of communication, manufacturing, pace of work and teamwork.” As with any engineering project built from the ground up, UCF’s team overcame some obstacles including early flight stability challenges and, later, testing failures with the payload. “We relied on our determination to win, and our engineering principles to eventually make the system work within the aircraft,” says SilvaMelendez.
