Two teams of UT aerospace engineering students placed in the top five at a national competition to design and construct battery-powered airplanes.
The teams placed second and fourth in the 2008 Cessna/Raytheon Missile Systems Student Design/Build/Fly Competition in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday.
Teams built 4-by-5-foot airplanes that could safely transport a load of about seven pounds, while performing a different series of flight patterns 75 feet above ground at the competition hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
About 40 universities participated in the annual competition, and each was permitted to enter two self-managed teams. Hornworks and the Orange Bullet teams represented UT.
Aerospace engineering senior Martyn Hunt, the Orange Bullet's team leader, said that despite the 20 mph Kansas winds the teams faced Sunday, this year marks UT's best performance since its initial participation in 1997.
"This has been a competition that has been dominated by Oklahoma State University since the very beginning," Hunt said. "They basically place first and second every year. So just to say you were part of the only university, besides Oklahoma State, to have both teams place in the top five ever is a pretty nice feeling."
Participants constructed the aircrafts by hand from such materials as fiberglass, wood, carbon fiber and Styrofoam. Hunt said UT's aircrafts did not "look as pretty" as some of their competitors' entries but that this didn't stop them from performing well.
"Usually, when you build a gorgeous airplane, it usually weighs too much," Hunt said. "We went the competitiveness route instead of over aesthetics."
The teams were scored on their aircrafts' loading times and ability to sustain the weight of the loads. Load material consisted of water bottles and bricks that represented passengers and luggage on a plane, said Armand Chaput, engineering adjunct professor and the teams' adviser.
Hornworks' aircraft weighed 3.4 pounds without the load and held 14 water bottles, Chaput said, earning the team second place. The aircraft's loading time was 21 seconds.
Hornworks received a $1,500 cash prize and will demonstrate their winning entry at the 26th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences in Anchorage, Alaska, in September.
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