AeroHacks Organizing Team (L to R) Rony Islam, Katie Gross, Harshini Sivakumar, Jonathan Paravano, Molly Riebling, and Phil Clifton. To view more photos from the 2019 AeroHacks visit the AE Flickr page. 

Team "Tyred N3rds"

More than 150 Georgia Tech students descended upon the Weber Building on Feb. 9 and 10 to test their skills and knowledge in a 31+ hour Hackathon.

This is the second time that Delta joined with aerospace engineering student groups - the School of Aerospace Engineering Student Advisory Council (SAESAC), the Yang Aero Maker Space, and Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). The weekend-long challenge tasked 30 teams to solve one of three aerospace engineering related challenges.

Winners got some great swag and bragging rights.

"We had almost two times as many participants as the last AeroHacks in 2016, and I was truly amazed by what everyone made. It was also awesome having Delta as a sponsor who gave students a real-world industry challenge," said  fourth-year AE undergrad, Katie Gross, who chairs SAESAC and works as a mentor at the Yang Aero Maker Space. 

Challenge I - Rapid Prototyping

Students were challenged to design, CAD, code, and/or build something that leverages rapid prototyping technologies like 3D printing and laser cutting, or platforms like Arduino. First place went to "Tyred N3rds" for building a system that can find planes in the sky using ADS-B broadcasts from an airplane and then track it with a camera. Team members Jon Dolan, Tyler Lee, and Peter Simon each went home with a Ryze Tello drone. 

Team "One More Hour"

Challenge 2 - The Delta Challenge

Students were given specific data from Delta and were challenged with presenting it in ways to visualize, analyze, predict and model the data. Team "One More Hour" went home with the top prize for designing a new way to visualize flight safety data. Team members Alex Hoffman, Omar Abed, Sujeeth Jinesh, Ai Thai, Aaron Brown won a free Delta campus tour and Delta Museum simulation session. 

Challenge 3 - Mission Design and Planning

Students built their own spacecraft, fixed-wing, or rotorcraft mission and had to build out a system architecture that was flexible enough to accomplish a broad spectrum of mission objectives.

"The Kiwis" took home first place for their mission that enabled firing small-sats into orbit around the Moon from a railgun onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Team members Jairus Elarbee, Rich Hunter, Cal Phillips won a NASA meteorite fragment 8-pack collection. 

Team "Marvel" (2nd Place) and "The Kiwis" (1st Place) (l to r)

"Students across various majors and years - from first-year chemical engineering to PhD aerospace engineering students - worked together for nearly 31 hours to create truly amazing prototypes and mission plans," said fourth-year undergrad Rony Islam, lead organizer for AeroHacks 2019 and president of the Yang Aero Maker Space group.

"Enabling students to leverage Georgia Tech facilities, like the [Yang] Aero Maker Space, gave students the opportunity to explore their ideas, from hand-sketches to functioning prototypes.”

Delta's managing director of flight safety, Brad Sheehan kicked-off AeroHacks with a talk on Delta's flight safety initiatives.