The growing trend of global, multi-company collaboration within the engineering community has led to a changed work environment where new graduates must function under constraints that include global, cultural, and business contexts as part of the new engineering “fundamentals”. The classical “engineering science” education model lacks opportunities for students to gain experience that prepares them for this new work environment. To provide learning opportunities that will enhance the global communication and intercultural collaboration skills of engineering students, a pilot project for providing some goal-directed learning space was set up as a global experiential learning design studio in aeronautical engineering. During this project, engineering teams spread across the globe are designing, building and testing innovative blended wing body UAV airframes. The lessons learned from this pilot project are intended to generate a template that can effectively be used across different disciplines of engineering. This paper describes the education initiative and the accomplished designs. It additionally reports on experiences and lessons learned to date, and steps taken to improve the learning outcomes and graduate attributes, to enhance global team collaboration skills.