Our students won two second place awards in this year’s SAE Aero Design 2020 WEST – which was unusual since held online. Jury recognised our students for their engineering solutions in the Micro class category.

The SAE Aero Design competition is a prestigious event for students, with participants from technical universities from all over the world. The task is to design and construct heavy lift cargo planes which then take part in a flight competition. This year, due to the pandemic, the organisers had to cancel its most spectacular part - the flights. The students representing our Student Inter-faculty SAE AeroDesign Research Group (SMKN SAE AeroDesign) from the Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering sent the technical documentation of their aircraft design already at the beginning of the year. At that moment they could not have known that it would be the only material based on which this year’s awards would be granted. The information about the closing of borders came only less than two weeks before the planned travel to take part in the competition, but the students decided not to give up.

– Our team has worked very hard on the presentations of our designs. The conversation with the judges was conducted online. At the scheduled time, our students, in their best outfits, took their seats in front of the web cam to talk about their work with the jury. After discussing the research, design and construction process, and answering a few questions, we just had to wait for the results – says Grzegorz Muchla from SMKN SAE AeroDesign.

The results turned out to be very good and the jury awarded our team the second place in the general classification and also the second place for the technical presentation in the Micro class category. Also, the design in the Regular class category was ranked 4th in the classification, and the Advanced class model was fifth in the ranking. These great results would not have been possible were it not for the meticulously prepared documentation and the valuable presentation. – It’s a great success, and even more so as during the competition in its traditional form we were usually given more points for the flights. Now we await the moment when the terms and conditions for the next year’s competition are published, hoping this time it will be possible to participate in it in the traditional form – says the student.

How is aircraft for an international competition built? Read our blog entry.