For the second year in a row, the Flying Tigers are headed to nationals. A team of students from the School of Aviation Science at Irving High School won the Governor’s Cup at the Real World Design Challenge (RWDC) earlier this month to win the bid to national competition, to be held April 13 in Washington, D.C. Team members worked on perfecting their design since early in the fall and submitted a 62-page journal that detailed the project from start to finish. Team members are seniors Jason Bernal, Javier Ramirez and Gabriel Sanchez; and juniors Caleb Fancher, Erika Gamboa, Anthony Stahl and Angie Maravi Campos. Their coach is Craig Heckel.
As part of the RWDC, competitors were tasked with designing and building a drone to complete a survey and crop-spraying mission. Students were presented with two existing commercial drones as a benchmark and were challenged to make a better solution. Using CAD and flight software, students modeled and performed test flights with their design, and correlated flight characteristics they learned in the Redbird simulator to tweak their prototype.
