The Mach Initiative is a student-run organisation founded in June 2022 with the goal of developing the world's fastest remote-control plane. To meet this challenge, our aircraft must weigh less than 25kg when fully fuelled and take off and land under its own power using air-breathing engines, ruling out solid rocket motors. From June to October, we iterated through dozens of Mach 1 concepts converging on a 2m long carbon fibre monocoque design, weighing 22kg when fully fuelled and gaining thrust from an afterburning Jetcat P400 Pro micro-turbojet engine. This was further accelerated by the industry-leading CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software, Star-CCM+, provided by our sponsor Siemens. The next step is to develop a Transonic flight-worthy prototype, with eight University of Bath students working full-time on this as part of their degrees between February and June 2023. More information about the project and design can be found on our website below: https://themachinitiative.com
