The competition is intended to provide Bachelor / Master / Diploma students with a real-life engineering challenge. It has been designed to provide exposure to the kinds of situations that engineers face in their real-life work environment. Each team is required to conceive, design and develop a prototype of fixed wing UAV meeting the mission requirements. First and foremost a design competition, students will find themselves performing trade studies and making compromises to arrive at a design solution that will optimally meet the mission requirements while still conforming to the configuration limitations.

The importance of interpersonal communication skills is sometimes overlooked, yet both written and oral communication skills are vital in the engineering workplace. To help teams develop these skills, a high percentage of a team's score is devoted to the design report and the oral presentation required in the competition.

SAEISS Aero Design features two classes of competition - Regular and Micro. Regular Class continues to be the class with the purpose to develop the fundamental understanding of flight and the goal is to lift as much payload as possible. Micro Class teams are required to make trades between two potentially conflicting requirements, carrying the highest payload fraction possible, while simultaneously pursuing the lowest empty weight possible.

The Competition also provides multiple opportunities for teams from all over India to showcase the extraordinary talents of engineering students while encouraging them to develop innovative ideas towards development of improved systems for UAVs.

There are two parts to each competition, each with their own series of events. These parts are known as Static and Dynamic Events. The events award the team points towards a grand total. The team with the greatest total wins the competition overall. Some events, such as tech inspection, award no points but are required in order to proceed to other events for safety reasons.