Jaden Behringer

Jaden Behringer is an aerospace engineering student at Texas A&M and serves as President of the Texas A&M Vertical Flight Society, where he leads one of the university’s most technically driven student organizations focused on vertical flight. He is also President and a founding member of the Vertical Flight Design Team, where he directs both the technical roadmap and organizational structure of a 25+ member, cross-disciplinary engineering team. His work with VFD spans the full aircraft development lifecycle, from early configuration trades and sizing to detailed subsystem integration and flight testing. He previously served on the aerodynamics subteam, contributing to configuration selection, stability and control analysis, and performance trade studies for unconventional eVTOL and rotorcraft architectures, grounding design decisions in first-principles analysis rather than purely empirical iteration.

He currently leads VFD’s autonomous flight software efforts, with a focus on building a robust, competition-ready autonomy stack rather than isolated demonstrations. His work centers on flight software architecture, control integration, and autonomy development using modern toolchains, including simulation-driven development, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and modular software design to support perception, guidance, and control. Under his direction, the autonomy effort emphasizes reliability, testability, and clear interfaces between software and airframe design, ensuring that autonomy is treated as a core system rather than an afterthought layered onto a flying vehicle. At the VFS level, he also oversees finances, sponsorships, industry partnerships, and professional development initiatives, aligning technical ambition with sustainable execution.

Beyond VFD, he has expanded VFS into research and outreach to avoid the common failure mode of student teams becoming siloed or short-lived. He helped establish autonomy and AI research initiatives focused on applied flight software and intelligent systems, and founded UpLift, an outreach program connecting college engineers with underrepresented high school students through semester-long FPV drone design and build experiences. Outside of VFS, he is deeply interested in startups, product development, and technical leadership, including building a consumer-facing mobile application and exploring problems at the intersection of aerospace, autonomy, and systems engineering. His broader interests include teaching, community service, fitness, and personal content creation, all tied together by a focus on long-term impact, disciplined growth, and solving problems that are complex both technically and organizationally.