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For students of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering BUT, the Black Swan is not a metaphor or a ballerina – it is a small plane. Thanks to the use of composite materials, the model for this year’s Air Cargo Challenge has a black and red colour scheme and has therefore been named “Black Swan”. Students from the Chicken Wings team were tasked with transporting packages of “blood” and comparing their design skills with competitors from around the world. The team finally finished 5th overall out of 26 international teams. The next competition will take place in 2024.

After a two-year COVID hiatus, the “chickens from the mechanical faculty”, as the team is familiarly called, could finally spread their wings. At the beginning of July in Munich they showcased their new aircraft, which they have built especially for the Air Cargo Challenge. “The task changes every year and therefore we have to build a new aircraft for each competition. This year our challenge was to take off on a runway of a certain length, climb to a height of one hundred metres in less than one minute and fly for two minutes. The plane also carried cargo in the form of symbolic “blood bags”, which was a challenge for us: on the one hand, it is a relatively bulky cargo, but it is also a liquid, so the cargo is constantly flowing,” explains team leader Tatiana Kminiaková, adding that the Black Swan should be able to carry around two kilograms of cargo.

Black Swan:

The organisers had one more challenge for the teams: the aircraft must fit into an imaginary box in the shape of a diamond, the internal angle of which the teams can change according to what ratio of wing length to fuselage with tail seems most efficient. Normally, they would have had only ten months to design, manufacture and test the aircraft before the competition, but last year’s competition was cancelled due to the pandemic, so they were able to use two years’ worth of ideas. “Thanks to this, we have already finished and tested the aircraft, but we still want to fine-tune it,” says Kminiaková.

This was Tatiana’s last race with the Chicken Wings team. In addition to finishing the plane, she was also studying for her state examination to complete her studies in Aircraft Construction at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. “There are about ten of us in the team, a large part of from the Institute of Aerospace Engineering, but we welcome students from other fields as well. For example, this year we have a mechatronics student in the team who is helping us a lot with preparing for the autumn competition in Hamburg, where our next new aircraft must also have an autopilot and be able to take pictures in flight,” adds Kminiaková.

The students design and build the entire aircraft themselves; they are allowed to use only commercially available off-the-shelf components, but they make their own wings and fuselage. They competed against almost thirty teams from all over the world: from Europe to Brazil at the Air Cargo Challenge in Munich, Germany. “You learn a lot in a team. Above all, you can try out what learn about in school. Although we only build small aircraft, the principles we use also apply to large aircraft,” concludes Tatiana, who would like to move from small models to internship at a large aircraft manufacturer after her studies.