After just one semester on the Flight Dynamics Team, I was promoted to Flight Dynamics Lead. This came with a huge learning curve, having to learn all there is to know about flight dynamics and team operations in just a few months.

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My work was cut out for me, with 2025 being a rule-change year for the Advanced Class. Much of our previous work on larger aircraft would be very different, resulting in us having to adapt many of our tools and analysis methods. The 2025 rules shifted from a heavy-lift challenge to a lightweight V/STOL mission, looking for a 3.5 lb aircraft capable of conventional flight and payload delivery within an 8 × 8 ft square.

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As Flight Dynamics Lead, I was responsible for the tail of the aircraft and any other design decisions related to the aircraft's stability and control.

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As it often goes with design teams, I had to learn on the fly, making decisions for the team and ensuring our analyses were up to par. I learned to use tools like XFLR5 and made in-house calculators in MATLAB and Sheets. I identified gaps in my knowledge and filled them, all while adhering to our strict timeline. The tail's design, CAD, and assembly were the only parts of the aircraft that were completed on schedule as a result of my efforts.

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Having finished my work on the primary aircraft, I took charge of our vertical flight testbed, X25B (which I affectionately call the "Flying Piece of Plywood"), which greatly helped the software team with PID tuning and early vertical flight testing.

Although I wish I could say everything worked perfectly, the year was extraordinarily challenging for us. Delays on the wing and fuselage, as well as a late-spring melt, meant we had less time to fly our aircraft. Issues with our runway surface and many ground stability/landing gear deficiencies led to many failed test flights. When we did get airborne, our aircraft had a tendency to violently pitch and roll out of control.

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We rigorously investigated the cause of these issues, ruling out tip-stalling, motor issues, and more... until one week before competition, when we hypothesized that the rear motor blanketed the vertical stabilizer, resulting in a loss of effectiveness; a phenomenon that no textbook or resource ever mentioned. In response, our Chief Engineer suggested vertical endplates on the horizontal stabilizer, similar to the Space Shuttle Carrier.

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We attempted flights on the first and second day of competition, after arriving in Texas without a single successful flight. Both resulted in crashes. The few airframe members at competition pulled long hours getting our airplane "Frankensteined" back together, as we had crashed both our primary and backup airframes.

On the very last day of competition, we rose bright and early, and STRATUS flew for the first time. We later flew in competition, earned UTAT SAE's first-ever points in competition, pulled off a 5th-place finish overall, and earned 1st place in the Design Report for a second year in a row.

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This experience taught me so much... more than any textbook or reading ever could. We made mistakes, investigated and got to the bottom of issues, and fixed them. Our tenacity and grit are what helped us make UTAT history, and I am ever grateful to have been a part of it.