By Steve Manganelli
The leaders of the SDSU’s Design Build Fly (DBF) Team were honored to be invited to give a presentation at last weeks American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) conference. The national gathering of aerospace professionals was held this year in Downtown San Diego at the Manchester Grand Hyatt and SEFSD was there! Myself, DBF Mentor and Pilot, Steve Neu were on hand June 13th to cheer on the team and presenters Max Dommers, Jeremy Johnson and Gabriella Gonzalez (L to R in photo) describing their journey that led to their top 10% finish in the DBF Flyoff. See writeup in Aprils issue. The students were quite poised describing their trials and tribulations leading up to the DBF Flyoff. They described experiments with composite fabrication, subteam assignments and division of labor, finite element modeling of their wing structure, prototype aircraft fabrication and real world flight performance vs predictions. They described their schedule beginning with release of the rules/missions in early September to the flyoff in April, 2023.
Mr. Johnson and Ms. Gonzalez are next year’s co-leaders and face the challenge of their experienced team being “decimated” by Graduation! Recruiting will be a top priority said Ms. Gonzalez. Twenty- twenty four will be a rebuilding year and SEFSD mentors will be there to guide them to another successful effort. Watch for info here about next year’s DBF effort and cheer on the test flights as we support our San Diego community of Aerospace Engineering students at our Mission Bay Park field.
