SDM Chemical Engineering Seniors Jarvie Arnold, Gregory Clark and Martin Gaffney, pictured left to right, ran away from the field with their “Team Helicopter?” flying machine.

With a lot of ingenuity and fine-tuning of the paper-helicopter design via a full two-level factorial, they achieved a flight time of 8.66 seconds from the balcony of the Chemical and Biological Engineering and Chemistry (CBEC) building. This nearly broke the all-time record of 8.94 seconds achieved by The Flaming Bagel Dogs in 2013.

Check out this awesome video from the 2011 flyoff and follow the link from there for background on the SDM paper-helicopter experiment, which I’ve been overseeing since 2004.

Kudos to Professor Dave Dixon for championing CBEC’s DOE class throughout the years. This elective rates well above any others in surveys of graduates, who say it was “immensely” helpful for their career advancement. I’m very thankful to be a contributor to this success story for teaching DOE at the college level.

Rock on SDM CBEC!