SAE Aero Design West

SAE Aero Design

SAE Aero Design includes two regional competitions that challenge participating teams to conceive, design, fabricate, and test a radio controlled aircraft that can take off, land, and optimally meet the mission requirements.

During the SAE Aero Design competition students will demonstrate and compete their  technical acumen to industry-leading judges in three categories: written, oral, and aircraft  performance. Students will experience design through development of an aircraft to a rules-set  technical performance specification. Manufacturing follows the design phase; students will  produce their design in preparation for a two-day fly-off against their peers from other  universities from across the world. Students will experience strategic elements of design thinking  as accurate performance prediction influences all phases of the competition. Competitors will enter a new aircraft for one of three classes: Regular, Advanced, and  Micro Classes.

Micro Class: This competition challenges students to develop a small, light-weight aircraft.  In the continued spirit of wildfire management, this competition introduces large-volume fluid  management concepts to aircraft design.

Regular Class: As the competition’s legacy aircraft class, Regular Class focuses on  engineering fundamentals for constrained take-off under limited power available. The large  airframe size requirements test students’ structural design optimization skills to achieve  maximum payload weight performance.

Advanced Class: Today’s world is prone to environmental tragedy. Students participate in  a campaign against an unpredictable and evolving wildfire disaster in both airborne and ground  fire-crew resupply. This class challenges students to balance diverse and conflicting requirements  and introduces concepts related to autonomy and telemetry