NAU SAE AERO Regular 2019-2020
The Ponderosa Pilots

The SAE Aero Design competition aims to challenge undergraduate and graduate engineering students to design, manufacture, and test a payload-carrying aircraft. As participants of this competition, this team will design and construct an electric aircraft limited to 1 Kw. Our aircraft will represent NAU in the annual SAE competition. The objective of this competition is to successfully complete flights while carrying various payloads. The payloads consist of soccer balls, and steel plates. Primary stakeholders of this project include the university, the NAU College of Engineering, project sponsors, and the student team members.

The competition

Following is the original project description provided by SAE
The SAE Aero Design competition is intended to provide undergraduate and graduate engineering students with a real-world design challenge. These rules were developed and designed by industry professionals with the focus on educational value and hands-on experience through exposure to today’s technical and technology advancement. These rules were designed to compress a typical aircraft development program into one calendar year, taking participants through the system engineering process of breaking down requirements. It will expose participants to the nuances of conceptual design, manufacturing, system integration/test, and sell-off through demonstration.The Regular Class is an all-electric class intended to develop a fundamental understanding of aircraft design.

Scoring: The team is scored on three criteria

The Design Report

SAE Technical Design Report 2020

Presentation
This presentation will be given at the SAE Aero competition and is yet to be made

Flight Score
When simplified, our flight score is a function of lifted payload in pounds divided by wingspan in inches.

Update: 4/10/20

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, there have been some changes to the team’s end plan. Firstly, the in-person competition and test in Texas has been canceled due to health concerns. However, a virtual presentation event will be held. The event date is yet to be determined. Secondly, certain university institutional changes have led some team members to leave the university campus. This paired with many other related closures and decreasing access to facilities means that the team will not be making a higher quality competition aircraft. So far, the team was able to produce a viable prototype aircraft which has seen limited testing to demonstrate its in-flight control, takeoff and landing ability, and payload capacity. The team intends to perform full scale testing of this craft in an accurate competition atmosphere in the coming weeks. The team also plans to attend the SAE virtual design presentation.

NAU SAE AERO Regular 2019-2020 The Ponderosa Pilots

The competition

NAU SAE AERO Regular 2019-2020
The Ponderosa Pilots