Carleton University’s Blackbird Unmanned Aerial Vehicle design team won the Team Spirit Award, recognizing sportsmanship and support for other teams, at the national Aerial Evolution Association Competition in May.
The student-led team competed with its urban firefighting drone against nearly 20 Canadian universities from May 22 to 24 in Ottawa.
Blackbird UAV is an extracurricular design team founded in 2009 and is open to Carleton students. The team’s focus is creating an unmanned aerial system for the annual national competition.
This year’s UAV, Leviathan, is a modular quadcopter with an interchangeable payload system.
Leviathan’s modular capabilities are “a big highlight and something that people in industry can take from our design and use,” said Samuel Howell, a fourth-year aerospace engineering student and executive member of the 2025-26 team.
Compared to last year’s drone, Leviathan grew around 30 per cent in size.
“[Leviathan] had to accommodate for large payloads, like a ladder, oxygen, and handheld radio,” Howell said.
The team’s 40 to 50 active students spent between 10 and 40 hours per week building Leviathan after work began in September.
The competition included two tasks.
Task one required “doing as many laps as possible of a certain loop while carrying the largest payload you could, and then after you drop off these payloads you have to do fire reconnaissance,” Howell said. “So you do spotting of target dummies that are on walls and buildings and hopefully then return safe.”
The second task asked teams to extinguish targets which represented fire, with water on-board the drone.
Despite an electrical issue that prevented it from completing most of the second task, Carleton placed sixth.
“Carleton’s a fun team this year. There were parts that didn’t go quite as planned, but they still maintained a positive attitude,” said Katrina Cecco, the AEAC chief judge.
“After the first day we had gone out, we had performed really, really well. The entire team was working really hard and then it all had paid off for that first day, and it just felt so good to watch our hard work pay off,” said Kevin Fernando, a Carleton graduate and Blackbird’s 2025-26 president.
Blackbird’s drone varied from other teams’ as the team “custom built Leviathan specifically for this competition, rather than retrofitting some scuffed payload system on board,” Howell said.
Although Blackbird did not place in the top three this year, the group received the Team Spirit Award. This is awarded to the team that “demonstrates positive attitude and tends to support others [teams] as well, so they’re not just cheering for themselves,” Cecco said.
“Being acknowledged as the team who is there to support other teams and bringing good energy and support, even in the rain we showed up. It was pouring rain on Sunday morning when we didn’t have to compete, and we were still out there, talking with other schools, admiring other people’s vehicles,” Howell said.
Blackbird provides a unique opportunity to all Carleton students who are looking to get hands-on learning experience.
“Getting to apply those skills and learn basically industry standard skills is a really big benefit of what Blackbird and all of the other design teams offer to students,” Fernando said.
“When you have a niche interest that you really, really get into and put all of your time into and see it pay off, I’m going to miss that a lot. We basically had free rein to run the club how we wanted. Really nowhere else in life you get to experience that.”
Blackbird welcomes and encourages all students to join, including those outside of the engineering departments.
“Over the last 2.5 years I’ve got to know them and they’ve become really good friends,” Howell said. “We hang out after Blackbird, it’s a good atmosphere.”
“The friendships and relationships that you make through design teams like this, I’m going to miss being able to spend the long hours working with these people and seeing our hard work pay off,” said Fernando.
Fernando is most proud of the Blackbird’s structural changes this past year, creating a concrete election process and roles within the team.
Professor Jeremy Laliberté, who advises the team and shares his lab with its members, said that “Blackbird has really developed one of the strongest team dynamics, work ethics and overall collegiality.”
“There’s a really strong leadership team. They put a lot of emphasis on training younger students,” he said.
Next year with Howell as the club’s new president, Blackbird is expanding by competing in an additional SAE Aero Design competition.
When asked about next year’s goal, Howell’s answer was straightforward: “First place for AEAC.”
Featured image by Sue Chapman
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