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Following a record-breaking 10th year, in which more teams flew than ever before, the competition will return to BMFA Buckminster on the Leicestershire/Lincolnshire border from 30 June to 3 July.
We spoke to project manager Kristina Panikkar about what to expect from this year’s event, which could feature almost 40 teams.
What’s new for this year?
There’s a lot more emphasis on the design and testing, specifically the simulation elements. That’s what we focused on primarily this year – trying to fine-tune that, to give the students the right amount of time to do each of the stages in the design lifecycle.
We’re trying to educate more as well, with the webinars. We started doing them a couple of years ago, throughout the year of the competition, but we’ve put a lot more emphasis on them this year. We’ve got a couple more, and we’ll have sponsors and key personnel talking in those to try to aid the students in making design decisions and taking on board key elements from their industry experience.
More teams than ever flew at last year’s event – are you aiming to build on that?
The amount of teams getting to the event in a flyable condition and then doing successful flight tests is gaining traction year on year. I think that is largely to do with all these improvements and the additional support we’ve put in place each year.
For the students, we have sponsorship opportunities and mentoring programmes. We also offer steering committee mentorship, where they can ask for clarity on rules or different aspects of the competition, and they take up more and more of those opportunities each year.
We are seeing those have a positive impact on the challenge, by having more teams come in a state where they’re ready to fly very early on, rather than at the very end.
We haven’t changed a lot of the competition requirements because we really want to focus on fine-tuning that, the additional support at the competition, where they can get live feedback, live judging, and they can use that to improve very quickly. We’re hoping this year even more will be ready to fly.
How do you expect the event to evolve in future?
What we’re looking to do for next year already is adapt the mission requirements. What we’ve tried to do every year is change the mission requirements to actually reflect what’s happening in the world.
The competition is a simulated humanitarian aid mission. We changed the course a couple of years ago to reflect high-density populated areas. As well as obstacles such as trees, if you were trying to deliver humanitarian aid packages you would have to accommodate that with the movability of your aircraft.
Going forward, what we’re looking to do is develop new mission scenarios. We can give teams multiple options and then pick one at the event. They would need to be able to programme for that scenario. We will also be looking at the operational safety a bit more.
How does the competition help meet demands?
What industry wants to see is the innovation side – when students are given these new sets of requirements, how can they respond to those and what innovative ideas can they come up with? To do that, we have to give them testing requirements and scenarios to encourage that. We’re always pushing the innovation; that’s what we want. That’s what these competitions are – they’re not only to teach you the design lifecycle of an aircraft, but also to inspire you to think a little bit outside the box: “How can we come up with solutions? How can we do this?”
If we keep the requirements fresh, we give more and more opportunity for the innovation and evolution of designs.
What does the competition offer students?
The lifecycle of an aircraft can go from 10 to 60 years, being designed ‘outside’ in the real world, and this gives them a condensed course in how to do all of those different processes. You wouldn’t necessarily get that perspective in university. You would be doing small parts of it at every stage, but getting to see how it impacts a programme of work and the key considerations you need to make is a really useful tool for students.
Every competition we run, we have students saying how important it was for them in putting everything they’ve learned together. It also helps them when it comes to job applications and knowing what they want to do in future. There’s a wide world of aerospace engineering – this guides them into what they’re interested in and what they feel passionate about.
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