Winging it

The UMass Aeronautics Team is aiming to replicate an iconic flight test—with a twist.

For the third year in a row, the UMass Aeronautics Team is taking part in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Design, Build, Fly International Competition, where undergraduate students from around the world are tasked with designing, manufacturing, and testing aircraft in a series of missions. The objective this year? To prove fully autonomous flight in a series of missions based on the X-1 Supersonic Flight Test Profile, a paradigm-changing test that was done in the late ’40s and ’50s by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

“They took a bomber aircraft, [sent] it up to high altitude, and then had this rocket-powered small aircraft that would, at altitude, deploy and reach supersonic [speeds],” explains Jake Simon ’25, Aeronautics Team co-captain and program manager. “We’re doing the same concept, [except our] deployment aircraft has to be fully autonomous, with a full navigation system that’s going to land at a GPS coordinate.”

The team, which comprises some 30 undergraduate students, faced an uphill climb when it first started five years ago. Because UMass doesn’t have an academic aeronautical engineering program, the students have had to learn a lot of the technical aspects of aeronautics on their own. “A lot of the mechanical engineering stuff, we learn in classes—but everything about flight, we’re learning ourselves, and we’re passing down the knowledge,” says Simon, a mechanical engineering student who eagerly shares the technical aspects of competition, from designing and testing aircraft to how to utilize the team’s strengths to maximize their score.

The team, too, does their own fundraising, putting on events such as the annual Fly-In Pancake Breakfast, held at the Northampton Airport, to fund the costs of going to the competition. Last year, they drove more than 24 hours to the competition in Wichita, Kansas, to save money on flights. “Some of these teams have $200,000 annual budgets,” says Simon. “We keep doing these fundraising efforts to be able to allow ourselves to build an aircraft and fly to competition,” which, he points out, is hard to do with the five-to-10,000-dollar amount they typically work with.

Despite all the challenges, the Aeronautics Team took the field by surprise when, in 2023, the first year they competed, UMass Amherst came in second in New England and 24th internationally—and went on to beat their own record in 2024 by placing first in New England and 15th internationally.

“[2023] proved that we could go to competition,” Simon says proudly. The team went on to beat MIT the following year. “We really tried to diversify [the group makeup] outside of just mechanical engineering [students]. We had a few news stations come in—the [mechanical engineering] department really liked it because it made aeronautical engineering possible for incoming students.”

As the team prepares for this year’s competition, scheduled to take place April 10–13 in Tucson, Arizona, Simon says with conviction that they have their sights on the top 10.

“Competition is really fun,” says Simon. “There are 110 teams here internationally, all trying to do the best they can. It’s really cool to talk to everybody. You learn a lot by how they designed it, you have good conversations about the engineering process. We always think, ‘Why did I not think of that? That’s genius.’ And then sitting on the flight line watching all the other teams fly—and then getting the chance to fly and landing successfully—is a great feeling, too.”

Learn more and find out how to get involved or donate at the Aeronautics Team website, and follow along with their progress on Instagram. Plus, take a look at the 2024 prototype in action!