About
About the program
We are a student team at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, founded in 2026. Members do the engineering on a competition aircraft and run the project themselves.
We are a student team at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, founded in 2026. Members do the engineering on a competition aircraft and run the project themselves.
This is the first year, so every habit the team will have is being set now.
We want design decisions made in the open and mistakes caught early in reviews. That is a habit you establish in a founding year or spend years retrofitting.
Nobody here inherits a working aircraft or a set of habits from the class above them. Both get built this year.
Four commitments we made when we founded the program.
Members work the numbers themselves before reaching for a template, so the person quoting a figure knows where it came from.
Whoever runs the calculation stays on it through fabrication and flight, so the analysis gets checked against the aircraft it produced.
Design reviews and test results are shared across the team. Showing your work is the part we hold people to.
The competition sets a fixed date and a fixed rule set. We plan backward from March 2027 so the aircraft is flying well before it has to.
A written engineering report covering the design rationale, the analysis behind it, and the predicted performance. Submitted weeks before the event.
A live presentation to judges who question the team on its decisions. It tests how well a team understands its own design.
Payload-restricted flights at the competition, flown to demonstrate the aircraft and lift payload within the limits the rules define for the class.
Micro Class is where we chose to start. The airframes are small and hand-launched, the build is achievable with student tools on a modest budget, and the rules reward a light, efficient design rather than raw power.
The aircraft is sized to the rules, and stability and structure are checked before anything is cut. Tradeoffs are debated in design reviews and documented.
Drawings become parts. Mass and tolerances are tracked against the design as the airframe goes together.
We verify on the ground, then in the air. Ground checks confirm the systems; flight tests confirm the aircraft behaves the way the analysis predicted, and feed the next revision.
Stevens SAE Aero Design forms at Stevens Institute of Technology and commits to the Micro Class for its first competition cycle.
Initial aircraft sizing, aerodynamic analysis, and basic CAD + sketches of the airframe, with the founding team and sub-team leads in place.
Based on new rules, lock the planform, airfoil, structure, and propulsion, and finalize the predicted payload for the design report.
Fabrication and assembly of the first airframe, with the electronics built up alongside it.
Empty weight, center of gravity, and a motor run, all confirmed before first flight.
Flight tests validate handling and performance against the design and feed refinements before the competition.
SAE Aero Design East at Sun 'n Fun Aerospace in Lakeland, Florida.
