Collegiate Times

A group of 10 senior engineering students produced an award-winning design in a recent NASA aeronautics competition for college students.

Professor William Mason of aerospace and ocean engineering advised the team.

“It was a year-long process,” Mason said. “It started about halfway through first semester and ended halfway through their final semester.”

The team was one of many from Mason’s senior aircraft design class. The entire class filled out forms indicating what project they wanted to be a part of. Halfway through the first semester the teams were chosen and began working.

“It was the best team I’ve worked with in college,” said Ryan Paetzell, who graduated in the spring and is currently an employee of NASA.

The competitors were required to design a theoretical multipurpose amphibious aircraft that could rescue up to 50 survivors, hover to help rescue missions, land on ground or water, travel 920 miles, cruise at speeds up to 345 mph, and fight fires by siphoning water into an internal tank and dumping it while traveling.

“We thought we were going to win. We told our professor at the beginning that we were going to win it,” said Ryan Berg, who also graduated in the spring and is now an employee at Lockheed Martin.

During the eight-month process, each individual student or pair of students was in charge of investigating a certain section of the aircraft. The group met Tuesdays and Thursdays for two to three hours to discuss the design plan and update one another on the group’s progress.

“It was difficult because the competition was about a tilt-rotor aircraft and our school didn’t have any courses on tilt-rotor aircrafts, so we did a lot of research on our own,” team member Joseph Diner said.

They did, however, consult with an industrial team from aerospace giant Boeing. The required tilt-rotor design was similar to the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, a military aircraft with the same design, and the students were able to discuss it with the industrial team.

“Boeing looked at our report and gave us some tips about our design,” Paetzell said.

After the design phase was over, the writing process began. The students sometimes spent up to seven hours meeting and writing their paper.

“I had no life for part of my senior year, but the class was more involved, and we had fun,” Berg said.

The final result was a blueprint of an aircraft that resembled a catamaran with two parallel carriers, connected by a wing equipped with two propellers at the wing tips. The design beat teams and individuals from more than 100 colleges including colleges from India,
the U.K., China, Canada, Poland and Nigeria. A team of 10 graduate students from Georgia Tech and the University at Liverpool won second place and a team of 28 undergraduate students from the University of Virginia won third place.

With first place, the team was given $5,000 to be split evenly among the team. Two other students, Paetzell and Jason Smith, accepted paid internships at NASA, where they now work in the same field as their project.

“I think it was a good group of students,” Mason said. “They were all very smart and I know they are going to be successful.”

A version of this article appeared in the Aug 9 issue of the Collegiate Times.