NEWARK, Del. – Nick Vecellio is a captain on the University of Delaware Men’s golf team. He is a state championship qualifier in high school, a four-time national championship qualifier for club golf at UD, the club team’s leading scorer, and a varsity walk-on. It’s safe to say that Vecellio is a great golfer. Yet, perhaps his greatest work has been done off the course.
Last fall, Vecellio built a plane. Well, he didn’t exactly do it by himself. He was joined by 15 other UD seniors as part of the engineering major’s senior design project. While other students got to work on civil and health equipment, these 16 Hen-gineers got to actually build a remote-controlled flying airplane.
The purpose of this build was to ultimately enter the plane into the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Aero Design Competition. The competition features planes from schools all over the world and puts them to the test. What are those tests though? “It was kind of crazy, we had to drop Nerf footballs, we had to drop water bottles, and we had to drop a secondary autonomous glider. Basically, like a glorified paper airplane,” said Vecellio, a mechanical engineer.
Vecellio has had an interest in engineering since high school. Coming into his freshman year at Delaware he thought chemical engineering was the path for him, but, like so many other college students, along the way he had to make a change. “It was all just formulas,” said Vecellio of chemical engineering, “Mechanical engineering it’s a lot more how things move and operate. Kind of fixing machines and building things and how that works. I think that allows for more creativity, that’s what I like a little better.”
As long as the Aero Design students stayed within the competition’s rules (and didn’t spend more than their $3,500 budget), the plane could be molded by their collective creativity.
After about a month of research, the team was hit with their first real challenge. For the first time in a number of years, the SAE dropped a new set of rules for the competition. “We are one month in and like “Holy crap we did all this research and we have to change half our design to accommodate all this new stuff.”,” said Vecellio, “that was kind of a scary time, especially in the middle of golf season. Everyone is like, “hey emergency meeting at this time..” and I’m like, “guys I’ve got practice, I can’t.””
For a student athlete who competes during the Fall, balancing classwork and golf was difficult for Vecellio. “Early on I think people weren’t really understanding of how much time golf takes up,” he noted, “Everyone is trying to have meetings and discuss this, discuss that; obviously on the road or at practice you can’t go on the internet and do all the stuff they want you to do.”
Yet, as the season tapered down, he hit his groove. “Once you’re building it, that’s the fun part. You don’t mind going in from 9 o’ clock to midnight four nights a week because you’re building an airplane, it’s so cool!,” said a beaming Vecellio.
When the plane was complete, the team took it out for a test run at nearby Lums Pond State Park. “The first time we flew it, everyone was just holding their breath,” Vecellio said. “The first sigh is it getting off the ground, like “okay great” …. But then it still has to land.”
Land it did, and in March 2019 it was accepted to go to competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Vecellio was unable to make the trip himself, as he had a golf tournament in Tampa, Florida the same weekend. Yet things didn’t work out as planned. “I’m all scheduled to go to the golf trip and then the night before, I catch the flu. So I’m sitting in bed all weekend, – I’m texting everyone at the SAE competition, thinking ‘wow this worked out so poorly,’” remarked Vecellio, “I lived vicariously through them over the weekend.”
Due to some issues involving the plane and its ability to fly in wind, the UD team didn’t get to attempt a competitive flight. Yet, the project was still a success. They became the first UD team to send a plane to SAE competition, where they presented their finished project.
“Kind of like your golf game, you know problems are going to arise, so don’t freak out when they do. Take a step back, look at it, kind of figure out why and how you can go forward,” said Vecellio of the project. He noted, “It was cool to see the culmination of your engineering career.” His team-members agreed. “We would learn a lot in books, a lot of equations. It was nice to get a hands-on experience,” said Shehroz Khawaja.
When graduation arrives in just a few weeks, Vecellio hopes to take his engineering career beyond the University of Delaware campus. This project was a practical application of his studies, a motivator to see the real-world potential of engineering. Yet the project took Vecellio back to his engineering roots, “It’s kind of like building LEGO’s as a kid. It’s exciting to see where you start with all these individual pieces and then end up.”
(Photos/Video Courtesy of Nick Vecellio)