A team of Aerospace Engineering students from ASDL (the Aerospace Systems Design Lab) at Georgia Tech took first place in their division at the 2012 SAE Aero Design East competition in Forsyth County, Georgia, on April 29th. There were sixty-nine teams from nine different countries entered into three airplane classes. The Georgia Tech team competed in the Micro class, which requires an electric-powered hand-launched airplane that can carry the highest payload fraction while maintaining a low empty weight. The Regular and Advanced classes use gas engines and takeoff and land from a conventional runway. The scoring is based on a design report and a presentation describing the aircraft as well as the capability of the design to fly at the competition.

This is the first year that Georgia Tech has competed in the SAE Micro class, and the team had the lightest flying aircraft out of the twenty-seven entries into the Micro class. The airplane successfully carried over 3.5 times its own weight in payload. After building eleven prototypes with over 100 successful flights before the competition, the team was confident in the reliability and performance of the design even beyond the payloads flown in the competition.

More information can be found here.

Team Captain: David Moroniti
Faculty Advisor: Carl Johnson
Team Members: Austin Baldwin, Andrew Burrell, Tom Neuman, John Patrick Shivanandan, Daniel Simms, Vivek Viswanathan