Design Build Fly

A team of MIT students building RC planes for the AIAA’s design/build/fly competition.

Website: https://web.mit.edu/dbf/www/

Fall 2024

We built small balsa gliders and larger RC aircraft as part of DBF’s new member training. Our wobbly wing-fuselage attachment caused it to crash.

Our mission requirements for the year’s competition involved creating an autonomous glider that could hit a target, so I helped brainstorm glider configurations. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out the lift-drag ratio we’d need.

I helped with fabrication, including monokoting the wing and laying up the tail in fiberglass, for the first test flight.

We had our first test flight at the end of the semester! The plane had no dihedral and an essentially non-existent fuselage, so it was neutrally stable and required attentive piloting. It flew several laps successfully.

Spring 2025

We decided to build a glider in the conventional configuration, so I built several gliders with different methods to see what would be lightest. We tried testing the gliders, including by dropping them from a drone, but found that it was difficult to find a reliable way to release the glider.

I wrote the airfoil selection section in our design doc.

I spent a lot of time helping build two more aircraft to test fly, and spare parts to bring to competition to ensure we’d be able to recover from a crash.

At competition, I helped fix last minute problems (like a screw that just wouldn’t come out from a broken motor, and the glider release mechanism that kept sticking) and talked to other teams. Although we didn’t perform as well as I would’ve liked at competition (we were late in the flight order because we accidentally added extra empty pages to our design doc, so we had fewer attempts to fly), I still had fun and learned a lot.

I’m currently aerodynamics subteam co-lead and am learning AeroSandbox for next year!