The American Helicopter Society (AHS) this week announced that three teams from Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering have taken several top awards in the 2014 undergraduate and graduate Student Design Competition.

Placing first among the graduate-level design submissions was GT-AE’s XV-58 Manta, a manned fan-in-wing design, shaped like a manta ray, with two fixed pusher props in the rear. Two members of this team, Celia Leveland Frank Patterson, are the invited guests of the AHS International’s 71st Annual Forum and Technology Display – to be held next May – where they will present the details of their design.

In the undergraduate category, Georgia Tech’s Hammerhead and Project Raven took home the second and third prizes respectively. Designs for both the graduate and undergraduate competitions were submitted June 1.

“Both the undergraduate and graduate teams did an excellent job and continued Georgia Tech’s legacy in winning the AHS Student Design Competitions - almost 75 percent since 1984,” said AE Professor Daniel Schrage, who heads up Georgia Tech’s Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence.

“Interesting, too, that the Raven Team finished first among the 21 School of Aerospace Engineering designs submitted in Georgia Tech’s Capstone Design competition this spring, but they finished third -- behind the Hammerhead Team --- in the American Helicopter Society Student Design Competition.”

See the full list of AHS winners.

The 2014 Student Design Competition challenged college-level engineering students from around the world to design an experimental Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft – an X-VTOL. Teams were tasked with establishing key performance attributes - including efficient sustained hover, long-range cruise, high useful loads and sustained flight at airspeeds are about three times the speed of today’s helicopters.

As the 2014 Student Design Competition sponsor, AgustaWestland increased the prize amount --from $3,500 to $10,000 -- to encourage the next generation of engineers to pursue rotorcraft careers. Sponsorship of the AHS design competition rotates between AgustaWestland, Airbus Helicopters, The Boeing Company, Bell Helicopter Textron, and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

The U.S. Army recently joined this rotation, and will be the sponsor of the 32nd Annual AHS International Student Design Competition in 2015.

Also supporting the 2014 competition was Advanced Rotorcraft Technology (ART) which sponsored the use of its FLIGHTLAB software for this year’s graduate competition so that students could simulate the flight characteristics of their designs.

The American Helicopter Society (AHS) International is the world's premier vertical flight technical society. Since its inception in 1943, AHS has been a major force in the advancement of vertical flight. The Society is the global resource for information on vertical flight technology. It provides global leadership for scientific, technical, educational and legislative initiatives that advance the state of the art of vertical flight.