Hello AAE Students,

Have you ever wanted to design a hypersonic vehicle and then watch it get built and tested? Here's your chance!

We are hosting a virtual call-out meeting to discuss the 2026 JHTO-UCAH Undergraduate Hypersonic Flight Design Competition, run by the Joint Hypersonics Transition Office (JHTO) University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). This is a national competition open to undergraduate teams where winning designs will be manufactured and tested in a hypersonic wind tunnels at CUBRC or in a gun-launched flight experiment at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL).

🛸 THE CHALLENGE

Design an unpowered, aerodynamically stable hypersonic projectile for low-altitude operation (< 30 km) involving integration of aerodynamics, aerothermal analysis, structural sizing, stability & control, and trajectory optimization all at Mach 8.

This is a fantastic opportunity to apply your coursework to a real-world, cutting-edge engineering challenge and get hands-on experience with hypersonic vehicle design. We are hoping to form one or two teams of up to 15 students each who will participate as part of an AAE497 class for the Fall 2026 semester.

Full competition details can be found here: https://hypersonics.tamu.edu/2026-undergraduate-hypersonic-flight-design-competition/

The callout will be Monday, May 18^th from noon to 12:30 PM (Purdue Time) and can be accessed via this Microsoft Teams meeting link:

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/2482911058510?p=H8i5mJ5O8gnJKG8A3Q

Meeting ID: 248 291 105 851 0

Passcode: 6BC7r6ys

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Dial in by phone

+1 219-293-4410,,660401727# United States, Gary

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Phone conference ID: 660 401 727#