AIAA DBF'22

Held in Wichita, Kansas

Design/Build/Fly, or DBF, is a radio-controlled aircraft competition sponsored by the American institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Cessna Aircraft Company, and Raytheon Missile Systems. The competition is intended to challenge the AIAA student branches of each university to design, build, and fly a remote controlled airplane that can complete specific ground and flight missions. Additionally, the teams are required to submit a comprehensive design report detailing the most important aspects of their designs.

The problem statement for DBF’22 was to design, build and test an aircraft to deliver vaccination components. Missions included deployment of the aircraft, staging of vaccination syringes, and delivery of environmentally sensitive vaccine vial packages.

As a part of Team Agastya, my role was to work on the Design aspect of the aircraft and prepare the CAD Models, along with the drawings for the design report, which can be seen below.

Three-view drawing of the aircraft, along with dimensions.
Structural arrangement of the aircraft, along with its subsystems.
Layout of the aircraft and its subsystems.
Arrangement and accommodation of the payload inside the fuselage.

During the fly-off, I was the ground crew member, representing the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India at Wichita, Kansas. To get acquainted with our Fly-off Journey, click here.

TL;DR We achieved 7th rank in the Proposal phase, while in the designed report phase, we got the order 10th and in the fly-off, we stood 43rd!

Aircraft (and me :3) in the final staging area.
Post-flight image with our pilot, Mr. Don Ware (middle).
Our aircraft (Lakshya) at the hangar.

The final team roster for the 2022 competition cycle was as follows:
Akansha Gupta
Yajat Vashisht
Neel Adwani
Nimit Berry
Prajot Gorkhe
Sanjana Chauhan
K. Jai Srihar
Dev Pathak
Shreya Benjamin
Rikitab Mondal
Ishan Chauhan
Anshuman Vashisth