DIANA is a student association at the University of Castilla-La Mancha that designs, builds
and flies its own fixed-wing drones to compete nationally and internationally. It was founded
in 2022 at the School of Industrial and Aerospace Engineering in Toledo by Pablo
Zamorano, then an aerospace engineering student, and it is registered both with the
Castilla-La Mancha Register of Associations and with the university itself.
The name
The initials stand for Development and Investigation in Aerospace and Navigation Areas.
But the name comes, above all, from Diana Trujillo, the NASA aerospace engineer who
worked on missions such as Mars Science Laboratory and Perseverance. She is the benchmark the
team chose for itself.
What we do
We build electric fixed-wing drones to compete. Every academic year a new aircraft is
designed, built and flown, and each one carries forward what the previous one taught: the
2024 Insomnio, almost entirely 3D-printed; the 2025 Aurora, in balsa wood and
heat-shrink film; and the 2026 Eclipse, the first all-carbon-fibre aircraft, with which
the team made its international debut at the Air Cargo Challenge in Stuttgart.
With the founding goal achieved —reaching the Air Cargo Challenge— the association is now
looking beyond the annual competition: an in-house R&D department, several aircraft per
year, and experimental lines in rocketry and FPV drones.
Where
We work in the Sabatini guardhouses, small historic buildings next to the main gate of
the Fábrica de Armas campus in Toledo. They are the workshop, the office and the place where
afternoons go.
Why it exists
DIANA exists because it is addictive: whoever joins wants it to keep going. You start seeing
in real life what the lectures explain. Practice teaches far more than theory, and anyone
studying electronics, aerodynamics or flight mechanics feels the difference between paper
and an aircraft that flies, built with their own hands.
We are sixteen members from aerospace and electrical engineering at the start of the 2026/27
year, organised in four technical departments, and every September we open applications for
new people to join.
