DBF-2020

DBF-2020

TEAM

Raphaela Reiner Technical Documentation

COMPETITION

This years´ competition was scheduled for April 16th – 19th  2020. The Team did a great job designing and building two prototypes which showed phenomenal flight characteristics. Just before finishing the competition aircraft and shipping it to Wichita, we received a shocking message from the AIAA. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the AIAA decided to cancel the whole Fly-Off in Wichita, Kansas. We understand the decision as the health of the whole team has highest priority. Nonetheless the team was very frustrated and disappointed after investing more than 3800 working hours, a lot of money and pure dedication to this great project. The organizing committee decided to judge the result solely based on the design reports of each team. Out of 143 teams which handed in proposals, 113 were selected for participating at the Fly-Off. We knew the design report was very important in order to have a chance at the competition and therefor we invested a lot of time in the design report. The hard work payed off and we achieved the 8th place ex aequo with two other teams, as the best non-american team with only 5 points behind the winning team. At a real competition we would have caught up with the teams easily. The AIAA published some videos of the teams so everybody can see what the other teams designed and what they are capable of. On the one hand we are very proud of us by achieving a great report and a really good design but on the other hand we are disappointed that we can’t show of Mosquito at the Fly-Off and probably win the competition for the first time.   But we keep our heads up and next year we will come back stronger, for sure!

Flight Missions

This year the students had to design a banner towing bush plane with additionally space for passengers and luggage within a limited wingspan of 5 feet (~1,5m). Mission 1: The aircraft has to fly 3 laps as fast as possible to show of the flying capabilities Mission 2: Mission two was the cargo-mission where we had to store passengers and luggage inside the aircraft. Each passenger plus luggage had a specific weight of ~144 grams. We designed our aircraft for 30 PAX + Luggage, but more would have been possible. For this mission 3 laps had to be flown as fast as possible in a 5 minutes time slot Mission 3: For this mission Mosquito had to stow a banner, deploy it during flight and drop it after the last round. Longer banner influenced the score tremendously. The banner must have a ratio of 5:1, so we build large banners and 7,5 meters were no problem for Mosquito. We would have been able to tow 8 or more meters but the cancellation of the event quit our testing cycle. For mission 3 as many laps as possible had to be flown in a 10 minute time window.

Ground Mission

For the ground mission the banner had to be rolled up and stowed, passengers and luggage must be loaded and unloaded as fast as possible. The full rules can be viewed at the homepage of the AIAA.

Results

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