Thank you everyone for the suggestions. The team will make some improvements and try to get another test flight this weekend. We will use a bigger wing and hopefully have a third built by then. I will keep you guys updated.

Jester, I am glad you think about my questions away from here, I am honored

As for me, I am not a graduating with an aeronautical design, this is not offered from my school. I am aiming just to finish my mechanical degree and maybe go into concentration studies at a later time. The only classes on aero design I have taken are strictly for the this club and they are very limited with basic knowledge that only skims the surface of designing aircraft. My professor believes that this club is a great way to expand interest and create a demand for more aero classes and hopefully one day the school can offer aeronautical degrees. I certainly agree with him.

Some of the questions I ask are very basic but that does not mean I am totally clueless. Last year we designed a plane without any testing and with a very short and basic design class that performed decently at the competition. This year we are trying new things and testing them as we go. I believe it is a much better method of learning. Making mistakes raises questions, it makes the team look deeper into the problem and in the end we create a much better aircraft. Sure, we can look and copy an RC airplane that works well and slightly modify it to meet our requirements. Sure, this could be called engineering. Sure, it will fly. But, will it preform all the missions and score at the top? Chances seem low. On the flip side, I can take hundreds of aero design classes and learn all the formulas that aero students know and plug them in to build a plane that will fly because the math on the paper says it will it still does not guarantee first place.

So I guess to answer your question, more directly, no the school does not provide us with enough knowledge to be ready for designing airplanes for people to fly in but that is where the fun comes from.