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Submissions

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Proposal submissions for the 2026 Design/Build/Fly Competition close at 5:00 PM ET on 31 October 2025. No late submissions will be accepted for any reason.

The entry process and all reports will be submitted through the AIAA online system this year. No EMAILED SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED.

The online system will open and close automatically. It is the team’s responsibility to ensure that all pertinent documents and information are entered into the system during each cycle of the competition.

The team roster form can be found in General Information & Resources or accessed here.

 Submissions will open 15 October

Basics

  1. Login to the site using your AIAA username and password.
    • Note: The person submitting the original application (Letter of Intent) will be responsible for submitting ALL other materials
  2. For the Letter of Intent, select Begin Application for the Design/Build/Fly Competition (see Fig. 1)
  3. For the Design Report, you will need to select “Needs Attention” from your list of applications (See Fig 2) and then open the application (See Fig 3)
  4. IMPORTANT: To finalize your entry for a particular phase of the competition you must select Save and Finalize. If you do not select Save and Finalize by the deadline, you have NOT submitted your entry for that phase of the competition.

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Reports

All material contained within all proposals and design reports must be original work of the teams or appropriately cited in the bibliography section of the report or in the footnotes of the proposal. All proposals and reports will be reviewed using standard AIAA tools. Any material that is found to be uncited and non-original work will be subject to a penalty as determined by the DBF Organizing Committee. Based on the severity, penalties can include points deducted from the proposal or report score up to a 100% reduction or full disqualification for the competition year.