By Karen Kuhlman

Last week, the OSU AIAA Design Build Fly (DBF) team competed for the fourth year at the International Cessna/Raytheon Design Build Fly competition. A team of 12 students went to Wichita, KS from April 15-17 to compete against more than 80 universities from across the world and finished 6th place, the best in the club’s history.

The Design Build Fly competition requires universities to design and construct a radio-controlled aircraft around a set mission profile that changes every year. This year’s profile revolved around the process of distributed manufacturing and required teams to generate two aircraft – a production aircraft (P-plane) optimized to fit inside a larger manufacturing aircraft (M-plane). Planes were designed to complete a set of three missions: The first mission involved the larger plane (M-plane) flying three laps of the flight course within five minutes; the second mission involved the M-plane carrying the P-plane subassemblies and flying a lap for each respective subassembly within ten minutes; and finally, the third mission involved the P-plane flying three laps while carrying an internal payload (a 32 oz Gatorade) within five minutes.

Despite unfavorable wind gusts of up to 30 mph, OSU soared through the missions, successfully completing all on the first attempt as well as passing a bonus mission (assembling the P-plane and installing the Gatorade payload in under 2 minutes). The team’s 6th place finish secured OSU DBF’s reputation as the highest ranking school without an aerospace program for the fourth consecutive year. Congratulations to the team. Keep flying high, Beavers!