Founder/President of Duke Aviators
When I arrived, Duke was missing a community for students interested in aviation and flying, specifically. My sophomore year (2022), I got a small group of students together that also had their Private Pilot Licenses, and together we founded Duke Aviators: a new group dedicated to sharing our passion for aviation with the Duke community and beyond. Since then, we’ve built an on-campus flight simulator, sent over 30 members on funded introductory discovery flights, had 3 members complete their private pilot training, led high school outreach workshops, and raised over $30,000 in funding to sponsor new projects and initiatives. For my senior year (2025), I’m stepping in again as President to solidify our group’s impact and presence within our engineering community for years to come.
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- Flight Simulator
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- Discovery Flight program
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- B737 Sim Event
Simulator Development
In my junior year, I used my engineering experience to take the lead on renovating our on-campus flight simulator, which works seamlessly with our weekly ground school lessons to introduce the fundamentals of general aviation and allow students to gain hands-on flying experience right on campus. I led a dedicated team of engineers to improve our simulator’s capabilities to become a state-of-the-art, immersive, realistic flight simulator.
From conceptual design to hands-on manufacturing and machining, we developed our own Cessna 172 G1000 simulator with interactive displays and hardware. With a laser-cut dashboard, 3D-printed mounts and switches, custom-machined brackets, and hard-wired screens and control inputs, engineers with a variety of backgrounds and skill sets were needed to make this happen. For 2024-2025, we’ll be further implementing and refining this design to ultimately make it available for easily accessible flight lessons for the entire Duke community.
Outreach
A major aspect of the organization is outreach. We formed a partnership with a local flight school to negotiate discounted flying rates and even a Discovery Flight program for selected club members to have a fully-funded introductory flight lesson. Lastly, to reach beyond Duke, we partnered with local Durham Public Schools to run aviation workshops for middle and high school students, introducing them to the aviation industry and giving them a chance to try out our mobile flight simulators! In just our first year, we sent 15 Duke students flying for the first time and taught over 50 local middle and high school students about the field.
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- Middle school mobile simulator workshop
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- More discovery flights
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- Presenting at local high schools
In the future, we’re looking to expand our flight simulator to be even more realistic and grow all of our outreach programs – ultimately working towards our mission of sharing our passion for flight with the Duke community and beyond. I’m extremely proud of this group’s progress in my time at Duke thus far, and I can’t wait to see how it grows from here.
Check out our Instagram for more!
