Leonardo da Vinci had once remarked ,”For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return”. Five hundred years later, these exact words are echoed by Mandar Khapekar, captain of The Radio Controls Club, BITS Pilani. A peek inside their room revealed planes and boats of all shapes and sizes meticulously stacked up against the wall with motors and batteries scattered all over the floor and a bunch of enthusiastic students pondering over what looked like a quad-copter.

“As the name suggests, we build RC planes, ships and quads but we don’t like to limit ourselves to that”, clarifies Mandar. However, the RC club organizes no events of its own during APOGEE: rather. it takes part in numerous events such as “Airborne”, “Trac-o-mania” among the many others. Two years ago, “Team AeroBITS”, a subset of their club was created with the sole purpose of taking part in national level inter-collegiate competitions held across the country and beyond.

“Our primary aim is to represent BITS at an international level: taking part in APOGEE is secondary”, says Mandar. With the rest of the team now well established, the club has set its sights on winning the Student Unmanned Aerial System (SUAS) competition, held during the month of June this year at Maryland, USA. Since it’s their first such appearance at an international event, excitement level is at an all-time high amongst club members. ”It’s the dawn of a new age for the RC club”, exclaims Mandar with a nervous laugh.

“As a captain, I can feel a sense of responsibility placed on my shoulders. It’s a challenging role”. Being an active member of the club since his early days, Mandar has experienced a lot of ups and downs and has been through a few turbulent times as well. “We did not have purpose back then: our scope was very limited and there were only a few recruitments”, says Mandar. As a co-founder of Team AeroBITS, he can now say with a sense of pride as to how well the club has evolved to become what it is today. “It has indeed been a remarkable journey so far”, says Mandar and hopes to see the club achieve even greater heights in the coming years.