Students from SUNY Poly’s Design, Build, Fly (DBF) team Monday gave their newly constructed aircraft a maiden voyage before making adjustments ahead of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) collegiate DFB competition, bringing teams from across the nation to compete in April. 

“We’re out here today to test out our prototype, get a couple test results in, see how it does,” said SUNY Poly DFB team member Joshua Mathews, a mechanical engineering student. “It’s the first real experiment on how everything on paper is going to transition to real life.”

The team, led by SUNY Poly Professor of Engineering Dr. William Durgin, includes members Megan Ruffos, Connor Schultz, Matthew Neal, Ashleigh Johnson, Michael Vasilik, Rita Ramsden, Edward Rosachi, Jacob Cardinal, and Mathews.

The AIAA DBF Competition is scheduled to take place in Wichita, Kan. April 16-19, 2020. The trip will be funded through a faculty development grant and supplementary funds.

Snow covering the runway at the private Frankfort-Highland airport was shoveled by students to make a path of at least 20 feet for the plane’s takeoff. In addition to the maximum runway length, students made sure the aircraft met the maximum five-foot wingspan and that all controls worked properly prior to takeoff. 

While the prototype plane was built over a three-week course, the nine-student team has been designing it since September. The aircraft is a biplane design, meaning it has two parallel fixed wings and tows a banner. It can also accommodate miniature figurine passengers.

“Most of it was behind the scenes, actually doing calculations and seeing what will work out,” Mathews said.

The plane flew for about seven minutes before it made a rough landing, damaging a piece of its tractor configuration—a chance for the SUNY Poly team to further hone the plane’s flight capabilities before the competition.

“I think we saw the plane was definitely tail heavy, and we’re going to definitely have to fix that,” he said. “It definitely gave us a lot of information about what we can do to make it better.”