As students from all over the nation and world gathered for one of the top aerospace engineering competitions, Thomas Eaton- Eckart led his team to a top-20 finish.

A 2018 Kingfisher High School graduate, Eaton- Eckart was the chief engineer for the University of Oklahoma College of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering team as it competed in the 28th annual American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Design/Build/Fly competition.

A senior at OU, Eaton- Eckart is the son of Misty Eaton and Michael Eckart and is married to Maria Eaton, who is also a student at OU completing her undergraduate studies for dental school.

University students from 32 states and 12 countries gathered April 18-21, in Wichita, Kan., to put their knowledge and engineering skills to the test and vie for top honors.

Eaton-Eckart and nine other team members placed 17th out of 107 teams participating in the full DBF competition which includes a written technical report and a fly-off.

Tasked with designing and building a remotely operated radio control airplane for urban air mobility, the teams were given three specific missions - to conduct a delivery flight, a medical transport flight and an urban taxi flight.

Teams also had to demonstrate how quickly they could change their aircraft configuration for each task.

Once the team received the rules for the competition at the beginning of the fall semester, Eaton-Eckart said, “We were able to dive in and do some scoring sensitivity analysis and try to figure out how to configure and optimize the plane.”

First the team works through the conceptual and preliminary design phases to determine the basic confi guration of the aircraft and other aspects, he said.

“We had our first test flight for our design in November and it really performed well, which made it easy going into winter break,” Eaton-Eckart said.

Next up was time spent in the detail design phase, which he said focused on aspects such as the swivel mount of the wings, final data points, the final shape and mission specific characteristics for the plane.

“There weren’t any major design changes from conceptual to detail design because our first test flight went really well,” Eaton-Eckart said.

Overall scoring considerations include the technical report, which is then multiplied by the team’s performance score to provide the final score.

With the technical report being a major factor of the overall score, Eaton-Eckart said the team performed really well reaching 22nd place on that aspect, placing them above the likes of Stanford and Cornell universities.

“We’ve gotten better every year on our technical report and being in the top-25 this year was really nice because it meant we had four full flight attempts at competition (although only three were flown due to weather),” Eaton-Eckart said.

Additionally, the team also placed overall ahead of the University of Texas, which although not an overall goal, Eaton-Eckart said jokingly, is always an internal goal.

Serving as an OU College of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering capstone project for the eight seniors on the 10-member team, the team took first overall outstanding aerospace project and best final capstone project presentation in competition with eight other projects in the aerospace category, including rocket and space exploration projects.

During his time at OU, Eaton-Eckart said he has gained a lot of knowledge and skills, but one of the most impactful has been de-veloping effective communication skills and learning how to take advantage of networking opportunities.

“It was a little bit of a culture shock coming from Kingfisher with a class of only 80 students to lectures with over 400 people,” Eaton- Eckart commented.

“It was really fun getting to learn how to work with people that I had no idea of where they came from and the overall thing that I learned is that I needed to be able to communicate better with people that I may not know,” he said.

While working on his capstone project, Eaton- Eckart said he learned how to be a better leader and was involved in different situations that he wouldn’t have otherwise had the opportunity to be a part of.

Currently working for Boeing, Eaton-Eckart said he hopes to become a manager at some point and the project helped him become a better leader in terms of going forward in his career.

Reflecting on the yearlong process of developing the aircraft for competition with his team, Eaton-Eckart said, “It was really challenging and I enjoyed figuring out all the constraints with my team.”

Discussing a problem the team encountered during the competition, Eaton-Eckart said they had to do some “on-the-fly thinking” and it was a fun process.

“I was a part of a really great team and everybody wanted to help as much as I did,” Eaton-Eckart said.

“It was really great to be a part of a team like that and going out on top is about as good as it can get.”