Design. Build. Fly.
The Vertical Flight Design Team (VFD) is an undergraduate student led, multidisciplinary engineering team within the Texas A&M Vertical Flight Society that designs, builds, and flies advanced electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for the international VFS Design Build Vertical Flight competition. VFD is organized to reflect a real aerospace flight program, with dedicated subteams in Aerodynamics and Performance, Structures and Manufacturing, Avionics and Controls, and Autonomous Flight Software. The team operates under a systems driven design philosophy, emphasizing requirements definition, cross disciplinary integration, and validation through analysis, simulation, and flight testing. Members take end to end ownership of complex flight systems, from conceptual design through manufacturing and autonomous mission execution, while working within real regulatory, safety, and operational constraints.
VFD won the 2024 VFS Design Build Vertical Flight competition and placed top five overall in 2025. In addition to pursuing another championship, VFD is expanding its scope by aggressively advancing internal design and research goals that go beyond competition minimums. These efforts include developing the team's first fully autonomous variable pitch propeller hexacopter manufactured entirely in house, designing and fabricating custom carbon fiber composite propellers, implementing a meta learning neural network for real time wind rejection, and developing a custom flight controller architecture tailored for autonomous vertical flight. Together, these initiatives position VFD not only as a top performing competition team, but as a platform for long term innovation in autonomy, propulsion, and vertical flight system design.
VFD members are hand picked every year to form an elite team united under two common goals: pushing the boundaries of vertical flight with our own internal research goals, and winning the National Design-Build-Vertical Flight (DBVF) competition hosted by the Vertical Flight Society (VFS). While VFD members are divided into four sub-teams, there is a high degree of interdisciplinary collaboration and VFD members become experts in a variety of fields. Our team members' renowned blend of ingenuity, dedication, and technical skills allow them to thrive in real-world engineering applications. VFD is more than just the world's premier vertical flight design team, it's a hub for the next generation of pioneers in aerospace and aviation.
