Wings of fire

Four bright minds from RV College of Engineering made it all the way to Brazil, thanks to the creation of their very own plane. Team Pushpak comprising Vikas Wadhvani, Sriraj Kumar Reddy, Shiv Mady and Viraj Shetty, all students of Electronics and Communications recently took part in the ‘Society of Automotive Engineers’ competition held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Talking about the competition, Vikas says, “We were the first Asian team to take part in SAE, Brazil. As part of the project, we had to build an unmanned aerial vehicle which would carry a maximum load with certain engine, dimension and weight restrictions. The main idea was to decrease the weight of the aircraft and increase the potential to lift weight.” While the maximum weight lifted by an Indian team till then was 4.5 kg, Team Pushpak managed to lift 4.7 kg with their plane.
As they set out to travel 15,000 miles away from the country, these students faced a huge challenge at the Delhi airport when their package wasn’t allowed into the plane. “The wing of our plane was eight feet long, so it wasn’t fitting into the airplane. We were stranded at the airport for 26 hours. We had to cut the wing into three parts and then board the flight. We stayed up all night fixing the wing,” recollects Vikas.
On the first day of the competition, their flight crashed. “Everybody felt sad for us and kept saying ‘Arrey baba’ and ‘Bhagwan ke liye’ (which they had heard from a famous sitcom in Brazil!) Many even thought that we’d be going home after the crash,” says Sriraj. But the team stayed up all night and reconstructed the plane in 12 hours. “After our plane landed, the crowd cheered for us. We were even featured on the Brazilian National Network,” says Sriraj.
Team Pushpak won two awards — one for being the first team to represent Asia and the other for the ‘most exciting flight.’