When I heard that an aerospace hackathon was about to happen, I wasn’t sure if I should even participate. A few of the projects had already been published in advance, but they weren’t that much interesting to me. I also asked the organizer lots of questions about the process so that I would have an accurate idea of what to expect.

In the end, I had nothing planned for this cloudy and grey weekend, so I decided to go to the introductory event after all.

All the projects were introduced here, and there was one project that interested me more than the others. It was about the fact that it is physically possible to fly at supersonic speeds without the typical sonic boom being audible to people on the ground. Because the sound waves are reflected back upwards when certain conditions are met.

I decided to join this project and then got to know the others who wanted to work on it – we became a team: Sonic Wave.
Shruti Saxena, Aleksandr Rasskazchikov, Fabio Niglio, Akshat Goel and me.

I saw my task as primarily dealing with the physics and its calculation. Although we did divide our tasks according to our strengths, we did not keep them strictly separate in the course of the project, partly because some subtasks required more work than others.

We agreed to spend the evening preparing for the next day, which would be our only full day of work, by familiarizing ourselves with the topic. On that day, we got started and really knuckled down. My worries that we would be working through the night did not materialize. We made very good progress throughout the day.

The result was a systematic that calculated the parameters for a boomless supersonic flight for each flight connection entered. The program was graphical and interactive, accessible via a browser, almost child’s play to use, and visually aesthetic.

The presentations began at noon on the next day. The other teams had solid to equally impressive results, so I wasn’t sure if we would prevail or convince the judges. But then the moment came: “…and the first prize goes to: SONIC WAVE!!!”.

Wow. I was both surprised and overwhelmed. It seemed a little surreal. We were very happy about this award.

I found it remarkable that some of the projects (not ours) had a clear funding background, which made me wonder how neutral the jury would be. But the fact that they made their decision completely independently reinforced my belief in how valuable and honest this event was.

I found it remarkable that there were guests from Israel. They were nice people, but due to all the work and focus, I didn’t get to talk to them much. I’ve decided to talk to them about life in kibbutzim next time 💙.