 The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory is working with the Vertical Flight Society to guide and mentor the next generation of scientists and engineers. The Vertical Flight Society is the world's premier Vertical Flight Technical Society and ARL is the Army's National Research Laboratory. The laboratory signed a five-year educational partnership agreement with the Society earlier this year in order to collaborate on Vertical Flight Education outreach initiatives. The Vertical Flight Society's partnership with ARL is really a fantastic opportunity for our two organizations to work together towards common objectives, which is to develop the workforce for the future. Army programs and Vertical Flight programs across the country need experts in Vertical Flight. We need VTOL engineers, and a lot of those engineers are going to be trained at universities like University of Maryland, and we need to give them the skills that they need to hit the ground running when they either start working for the Army or for industry, either for future vertical lift, advanced rotorcraft programs or commercial programs. We need to give them all the skills they can use, and designing their own aircraft that will meet specifications, that's what life is about, that's what a career is about. So giving them these demanding requirements and having them meet them is in everybody's interest for the benefit of the Army and the industry. Yeah, the educational partnership agreement with the Vertical Flight Society and its members, such as students and industry members, it allows us as the research laboratory access to students who are researching in aerospace engineering, vertical takeoff and landing, flight, urban air mobility, new concepts for vertical takeoff and landing, new concepts for flight. It allows us to engage with them in a collaborative way, so that we can talk the same language as far as research and engineering, we can invite them to facilities like this and engage with them in research and hands-on integration and engineering and flight, and ultimately contribute to their education and to their enrichment in terms of engaging with folks outside of their normal domain and outside of our normal domain of normal researchers or engaging with researchers, we can engage with them as students, one on one. ARL is an integral part of the society's design-build vertical flight competition, which seeks to encourage interest in unmanned aircraft technology and small-air vehicle design and fabrication at the university student level. So we really wanted to challenge the students to design something, to design, build and fly competition, where they can design their own aircraft, build them, test them and meet some of the, meet the requirements that we set out for them for the competition. The end-all system itself, the product or the thing that's flying, may not necessarily be what gets transitioned. It's the knowledge that along the way we're asking questions, we're learning answers to hard questions, we're solving challenging problems and complex problems in modeling simulation and flight physics, and how do we put that onto an aircraft, what does it really look like, why does the configuration look like it looks like, what is the purpose of each and every sensor or component that's on that aircraft and how does it contribute to learning and how does it contribute to the body of knowledge for flight research? Researchers are excited to embark on this partnership with the Vertical Flight Society to help prepare the next generation of engineers and leaders to push the limits of this exciting technology into the future. We get the chance to engage one-on-one with students and we get a chance to mentor them and we get a chance to learn from them too because they have knowledge that's being transferred to them through their professors and their interactions and their engagements with other organizations and so they're transitioning knowledge to us as well. They'll be learning new techniques, understanding new ways of doing flight research or design and so they have the ability to, I would say, influence their education, maybe talk to them about what it means to be a civilian researcher, talk to them about and listen to them when they're, when we ask them what are you interested in, and it may not be flight, it may be something different that's tangentially related and we can talk to them, we can connect them, they have a network of people that they're linked up to now, just as we do as well when we engage with them, that's part of it as well, so just engaging, networking, listening and then trying to set the stage for their success.