What followed was a frantic “scramble” to salvage what they could from the heavily damaged aircraft and combine working parts with an earlier prototype.
The improvisational engineering paid off – six days after disaster struck, the team was named grand champion of the IMechE student event for the second year in a row. Professional Engineering spoke to Naik about this dramatic comeback win.
A fresh start
The journey to success on 2 July started in late October last year as the whole team got to grips with a new set of competition rules. “Everything had changed entirely from last year. Last year, the payload drop as part of the mission was a box of sand, a solid humanitarian aid,” Naik said.
“This year, the whole scope changed. We were now focusing on an agricultural drone dropping water instead. And with that comes a lot more challenges as well – which we discovered later down the line.”
To meet the ‘crop sprayer’ brief, the team started getting together in groups every week, assigning roles and discussing initial design ideas for the autonomous aircraft. One key question was how to improve on the previous year’s win.
“A couple of things we wanted to focus on were quality and building a very strong-looking design. And so as we progressed, we did a lot of simulation work, understanding flight simulations, doing a lot of analysis with aerodynamics,” Naik said.
As 2026 began, the students had a “decent picture in mind” of the design. It would be a fixed-wing drone using ‘prepreg’ carbon fibre for its durability, a first for the team. It also featured a new gyroid, which had not been used in an uncrewed aerial system (UAS) before.
“It was very exciting for us,” Naik said. “That’s where we really began looking into the intricacies of the competition, especially how the point scoring works. Where can we try to squeeze a little bit of efficiency here and there? For example, what’s the best way to carry and deploy water? Is there a way we can try to carry a bit more payload and go for less waypoints? Or can we reduce the amount of water we’re carrying and fly a bit faster, fly a bit more efficiently?”
Ground testing of subsystems, including the propulsion system, began following that analysis work.
“We spent a very, very long time on what size of propeller do we want? Just to squeeze that last bit of efficiency out,” Naik said. “As we got into the manufacturing stages, it was a lot of experimentation, especially with these new materials. How do we create the moulds? How do we create replicability?
“We really pushed early on to create a prototype. The ethos and the philosophy that we had was: ‘Let’s just try to build something, get it going, and then iterate on that’, rather than just go for perfect analysis and a perfect drone.”
They got a prototype going, with the first flight testing going well, before building the final aircraft. Then disaster struck.
‘We’ve lost an entire aircraft’
“The twist in the tale was three days before the competition, during a flight test, we were carrying our payload and our aircraft stalled and ended up nose-diving into the ground,” Naik said.
“I remember getting this call at 6pm as we’re preparing things for competition. And all I get told is: ‘The fuselage is totalled and we’re heading back now.’ It was a really crucial point in time where we had to, as a team, get together very quickly, bring together a crisis meeting of ‘OK, what do we do now? We’ve lost an entire aircraft.’”
All the team had left was a broken drone and the earlier prototype. The plan shifted to retrofitting that as quickly as possible.
“We could try to salvage what we could from the crashed aircraft, put it on to the prototype, and within 48 hours we had to completely rebuild and completely retest this entire airframe,” Naik said.
“Heading into competition, it was a lot more of a scramble than what we’d imagined. But it was a lot of long nights and eventually we managed to get it going.”
That last-minute rush meant a much smaller flight test window for the team, but they made the most of what they had. As the competition started at BMFA Buckminster in rural Leicestershire, “high hopes” had returned after successful initial tests.
From there, the excitement of the competition took over. The “huge” scale of the event and the diversity of designs were “really fascinating”, Naik said, and the team enjoyed discussing design intricacies with competitors from around the world.
As flights began, Team Bath was the first to get their aircraft out. “That was our philosophy right from the start… Let’s show them how it’s done.”
A quick lap on the first day was “pretty much” perfect, Naik said, followed by the long mission on the second day in which the majority of points were scored. As day two ended, they were almost neck and neck with Beihang University from China, lagging behind by six points after some slight issues with the payload on the second mission.
‘A lot of nervousness’
With one flight to go, “we had a lot of hope and confidence in the remaining point elements, especially our efficiency scores. Through all our testing, we were very happy with how efficiently our aircraft was flying, and particularly the performance on the day,” Naik said.
The day of the manual handling event brought one final twist of fate. The wind was high, with 35-knot gusts, “which was ridiculous for what we’d been expecting and what we’d experienced in the past. I think there was generally a lot of nervousness among all of the teams there. No one really wanted to go first, because if you see one aircraft try to take off and crash, you don’t really want to risk it,” Naik said.
“Regardless, we knew we had to step it up if we wanted to win the competition, so we went first and ended up flying brilliantly, despite the very high winds.” They managed to ace manual handling, receiving full marks and securing the top spot in the process. Environmental, airworthiness and operational supportability awards all contributed to the team being named the grand champions.
The win was testament to a well-run project and some innovative engineering. “We were just very, very happy, very proud of the situation,” Naik said. “We were able to rebuild ourselves after that massive setback.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.