Most internships end with a slide deck. This one ends with a flight test.
This summer, the nTop 2026 intern is designing, analyzing, optimizing, building, and flying real aircraft. Two aircraft, in fact, built around two very different philosophies of what an airplane should look like.
Two Airplanes, Two Design Problems
The first is a conventional tube and wing configuration: a fuselage, a wing, a tail, the shape most people picture when they hear the word "airplane." It has decades of aerodynamic precedent behind it, and decades of engineering wisdom about where its limits are.
The second is a blended wing body: a design where the fuselage and wing merge into a single lifting surface, with no clean line between where one ends and the other begins. Blended wing aircraft promise real gains in aerodynamic efficiency, but they trade away the well-worn design rules of the tube and wing for a much larger, much less charted design space.
Studying both side by side is the point. A tube and wing aircraft and a blended wing aircraft don't just look different, they respond differently to every requirement you hand them. Building both forces our interns to confront that difference directly instead of reading about it in a textbook.
Built to Change
Neither aircraft is being designed as a single, fixed shape. Both are parameterized and configurable, meaning the interns can adjust requirements, mission parameters, and geometry and get a new design back, not a redrawn one from scratch.
That matters because real aircraft design rarely starts with the right answer. It starts with a set of requirements, gets analyzed, and then changes again as the analysis reveals new constraints. A configuration that can't absorb that kind of change forces engineers to start over every time a requirement shifts. A configuration built to flex with its requirements lets them keep moving forward.
What's Ahead
Over the course of the summer, this page will track the program as it happens: design decisions as they're made, analysis results as they come in, and the tradeoffs the interns run into along the way as both aircraft take shape.
The goal by the end of the summer is simple to state and hard to achieve: two very different airplanes, each one shaped by its requirements, both of them flying.
