The Design-Build-Fly Contest

The AIAA invites all university students through the Applied Aerodynamics, Aircraft Design, Design Engineering and Flight Test Technical Committees and the AIAA Foundation to participate in the Cessna/Raytheon Missile Systems Student Design Build Fly competition. The contest provides a real-life aircraft design experience for engineering students by giving them the opportunity to validate their analytic studies.

Student teams will design, fabricate and demonstrate the flight capabilities of an unmanned, electric powered, radio controlled aircraft which can best meet the specified mission profile. The goal is a balanced design possessing good demonstrated flight handling qualities and practical and affordable manufacturing requirements while providing a high vehicle performance.

To encourage innovation and maintain a fresh design challenge for each years’ participants, the design requirements and performance objectives are updated for every new contest year. The changes will provide new design requirements and opportunities, while allowing for application of technology developed by the teams from prior years.

The Team

The joanneum Aeronautics team for the DBF competition consists of bachelor and master students from the FH Joanneum – University of Applied Sciences in Graz. Since everyone has individual strengths, an effective team structure was created to maximize the overall performance. The team was divided into three major branches: Management & Marketing, Engineering and Technical Documentation.

Meet this year’s team leaders: Fabian Pircher (Engineering), Sarah Slemer (Management and Marketing) and Elias Schmidt (Technical Documentation).