The Mach Initiative
Daniel Sykes is a highly motivated Graduate Systems Design Engineer at MBDA, where involvement includes a focus on Future Systems Engineering and previous roles as an Undergraduate Guidance Control & Navigation Engineer and Systems Design Engineer. With experience in applying AI and Machine Learning to defense challenges, Daniel has also founded and leads The Mach Initiative, aiming to break the Guinness Speed Record for jet-powered model aircraft. Additionally, Daniel served as Systems Integration & Recovery Team Lead for Project Boom, a UAS competition team, and has tutoring experience in A-level Further Maths. Daniel holds a Master of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Bath, with earlier education at Kingston Grammar School.
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The Mach Initiative
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