Introduction to “Aspects of Aircraft Design and Control”

I cre­at­ed this course on Aspects of Air­craft Design and Con­trol when my pro­pos­al to use a 48-hour slot in the third year of the aero­space engi­neer­ing cur­ricu­lum was accept­ed. The slot was ded­i­cat­ed to group work and projects rather than for­mal lectures.

The accep­tance came as an oppor­tu­ni­ty for me both to study fur­ther a num­ber of top­ics that I found cap­ti­vat­ing, and to try to share my pas­sion for civil­ian aero­nau­tics with stu­dents I par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­ate. In both aspects I have been delight­ful­ly overwhelmed.

I set­tled on the fol­low­ing main characteristics:

• Eight six-hour ses­sions, each ded­i­cat­ed to one giv­en problem
• Short, most­ly infor­mal lec­tures built in sup­port of the projects
• Prob­lems sim­ple enough to be solved with­in a week, but with lit­tle guid­ance built-in and that would leave room for stu­dent ini­tia­tive and experimentation.

For a com­plex set of rea­sons the course was held entire­ly in Eng­lish (includ­ing stu­dent reports and pre­sen­ta­tions), among stu­dents all non-native speak­ers of that language.

Prepa­ra­tion and set-up took two to three months of full-time work, spread over a semes­ter. I took great care to select and build course mate­ri­als licensed under Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es so that they could be freely shared and mod­i­fied after­wards. With the excep­tion of the sev­enth course, which I’ve had the great joy of teach­ing togeth­er with my good friend David, I con­struct­ed the course entire­ly alone, with the help of a half-dozen good books, much moti­va­tion and unspeak­able amounts of dark chocolate.