Fixed Wing

Fixed-wing is working on a subscale SAE Aero Design Aircraft this year with the goal of transferring the knowledge from the subscale aircraft onto the competition aircraft we plan on working on during the 2025-2026 SAE Aero Design competition. The current wing-span is going to 7ft in length and thus the aircraft will be sized accordingly to ensure it is flight capable. At the moment, the division has two groups, with both groups; structures and aero researching, calculating, and analyzing information from textbooks, online sources, past UTA SAE Aero Design aircrafts, and performing simple structural analysis on sections of the aircraft. The future plans for fixed-wing are to continue research to ensure all members in the division understand the fundamentals of flight in their sub-team (structures or aero). With that goal in mind, we plan on doing testing before the final assembly of the subscale, on items such as the motor (validate parameters of the motor and generate data needed for a mock SAE report), physical structural analysis tests (to see how close physical components hold up against a structural analysis that may be done in something like Solidworks), and much more for documentation and research validation purposes. As the division gets closer to design, a controls and electronics sub team will form to further progress in the realm of aircraft controls. Once the subscale flight vehicle is nearing the phase of manufacturing and assembly, a manufacturing group will form to help assemble the aircraft as specified. (edited)

Meanwhile, while all this is happening, Fixed-Wing will be having trainer aircraft weekends where Fixed-Wing will take a group out on a weekend to a field to fly RC trainer aircrafts (the ones provided by Dr. Chudoba) to help get people experience with flying and to have fun. The end goal is to also train 2-3 skilled RC aircraft operators for the subscale so we can successfully fly the aircraft with our own members once the manufacturing and testing is complete. All this will be documented and be transcribed into a mock SAE Aero Design report for the purposes of documentation and to help Fixed-Wing next year to begin documentation, report writing, and proposal writing as soon as possible.