Design Build Fly at Johns Hopkins

The Design Build Fly club at Johns Hopkins is a multi-disciplinary club which creates remote-controlled airplanes from scratch to compete with universities worldwide. Last year, we successfully revived our club after the pandemic’s disruption and achieved remarkable results at the competition in Kansas, overcoming significant challenges with minimal resources and an inexperienced team.

This year, we are committed to making a significant leap forward. We have been diligently working since September to optimize our plane's design via intensive calculations, collaborative brainstorming sessions, and CAD software modeling. We are especially excited that our new, larger plane is 200% the weight and has a wingspan 120% the size of last year’s design.

With your support, we will be able to incorporate advanced materials and manufacturing processes such as carbon fiber epoxying and aluminum water-jet cutting into our plane for the upcoming competition.

Here's how you can help:

• A $5 gift helps us buy small parts like nuts and bolts for assembling our plane. Every bit counts!

• A $25 gift helps us buy parts like pieces of balsa wood and plastic sheets for constructing most of our plane.

• A $50 gift helps us buy smaller electronic components like an avionics battery or a small servo motor.

• A $100 gift helps us buy larger electronic components like the main propulsion battery or a larger servo motor.

• A $250 gift helps us fund the most expensive aspects of our plane, like a radio transmitter, propeller motor, and 6' long carbon fiber tubes. BONUS: If you donate $250 or more, you get to put something on the plane! Send us some text or an image at dbf@jhu.edu and we'll stick it on the wing.

• Largest donation (minimum $500): name our plane!

Make your gift to support Design Build Fly today!