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 eVTOL aircraft for the international VFS DBVF competition. VFD won the 2024 competition and placed top five in 2025. In addition to pursuing another championship, VFD is expanding its scope by aggressively advancing internal design and research goals. These efforts include developing advanced machine vision autonomous systems, custom flight controllers, variable pitch rotor systems, custom carbon fiber composite rotors, and neural network-based disturbance rejection. 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 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.
