MACH Dust

This aircraft was used in the 2018-2019 competition, which was to simulate a military style bomber that would be deployed on an aircraft carrier. This competition was one of our most difficult designs to date and was required to have the following features:

• Folding wings so the aircraft could roll through a 2 ft tall by 3 ft wide tunnel

• Ability to individually store and drop a foam football “payload” on each lap with a minimum of 4

• Ability to take off from a 10 ft long, 5 degree angled ramp

• Inclusion of a removable constantly rotating disk “radome”

This aircraft was able to fly at competition but suffered a irreparable break in the wing folding joint on its first landing and was not able to complete all three rounds of competition. A lot of new construction and validation techniques were used in this aircraft, such as the addition of Arduinos, foam cutting for a validation craft, and wind tunnel testing to assess payload affects. We hope this will serve as a nice jumping off point in coming years.