CHENNAI: All of 13 years and 10 months old, Harsh Mathur from Bengaluru waltzed into the Boeing IIT National Aeromodelling competition, dominated by teams of towering final year and third year college students, and waltzed out with a cool third place and a berth in the national finals. To make the win even sweeter, this was the first competition for the aeromodelling enthusiast.
“I am not going to sit here and say that I could have done better had I a bigger team,” smiled the unassuming eighth grader from Bishop Cotton Boys’ School, “because the guys who beat me were really, really good.”
The teams that Mathur did beat however, 33 to be precise, were all from colleges. There were even a couple from the host institute - IIT-Madras. When Mathur first saw the abstract for the competition, he was excited - just for the thrill of taking the models he had been working on since the age of 12 and pit them against those of the others. But the competition required that he build up a completely new aeroplane from scratch. To make matters tougher, it needed to have a load dropping mechanism, had to fit into very stringent specifications and every step of the process of building the fuselage had to be documented.
“I went through three models before I was satisfied with the one I built,” admitted Mathur. “But each of them took me, perhaps, six to seven hours to build.” When Mathur, along with his father and mother, arrived in Chennai and drove down to the venue at the IIT-Madras techfest Shaastra, what he found were 33 teams, all comprising at least two members. And all from colleges with at least a few pursuing full time aerodynamics courses. But all doubts of whether he would do well went away once he got himself and his 100 gram plane through the first round - he was one of the 17 teams shortlisted to contest the regional finals.
“And during the finals, I scored a bull’s eye on the payload drop. All things considered, I think it went quite well. We just have to see how well I perform in the finals at New Delhi,” he said. Accompanying him to the national finals of the competition are the two other winning teams - both also from Bengaluru. The both winning teams had four members each, seven of whom were from the same college and pursuing Aeronautical engineering. From Acharya Institute of Technology, L Surendra Reddy, Neha K C, Honnashree P and Divya C Savant secured the second place in the competition. Their college-mates
Harsha M V, Y Vinay Kumar Reddy and Anil Kumar M V, accompanied by Baba Rupesh by from Alliance University, secured the first.
The Boeing-IIT National Aeromodelling Competition is an annual event organised in collaboration with aerospace major Boeing and the IIT. The regional finals are held during the techfests of IITs Madras, Bombay, Kharagpur and Kanpur, while the finals will be held at IIT-Delhi. At stake is a `1 lakh prize money for the winners at Delhi along with `50,000 and `30,000 for the two runners up and certification from both Boeing and IIT.