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Aircraft design interest?

At the risk of being accused of advertising, I thought that those who frequent this forum might like to know that the LAA in the UK have teamed up with Coventry Uni to run courses for aspiring a/c designers. Link here:

EuropaBoy
EGBW

No problem with mentioning this at all.

I think Cranfield was the other place but last I heard they did postgraduate courses only.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Great! makes me drool indeed. But (there's always a "but", certainly in aviation) none matches my current list of questions, and to enroll for a whole lot is prohibited by distance / cost of travel / female* nature of meteo. There seem to be slightly comparable classes in north-eastern France, might look into those one day.

*meaning "not rock stable, not reliably predictable any day, but always interesting"

EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

"Great! makes me drool indeed . . but none matches my current list of questions"

Perhaps this forum might answer some of those questions? [not me unfortunately]

In time I'm keen to design, build and fly my own a/c - SSDR might be a good stating point, something very short field, maybe electric/short duration - for those summer evening 45min flights . . .

"meaning "not rock stable, not reliably predictable any day, but always interesting"

Ho ho

EuropaBoy
EGBW

I'm not involved at Coventry, but know a number of people who are - certainly one of the lead teachers at Coventry I have done a lot of collaborative research with and he is an excellent teacher and very knowledgeable aeronautical engineer.

I can see nothing but good from courses like this - there's much whingeing in the UK about the difficulty of designing and building aeroplanes / mods / etc. In my opinion the bulk of this is not about the system so much as it's about the paucity of the engineering education available to amateur designers. These are only very short courses, and not particularly cheap at that - but an excellent start. That said, they do need setting within an overall design context.

If anybody wants to get their head around the basic process of designing an aeroplane from scratch incidentally, then I think you can do worse than start with this bookwhich is an excellent primer without pulling its punches on how difficult designing an aeroplane really is. If you've survived that book, then go onto this whilst en-route brushing up your maths with this and giving yourself a primer on aircraft structures with this. [Plus airworthiness standards and aerodynamics en-route: let's be honest, 6 doubtless excellent 1 day courses are not really a substitute for a 4 year degree in aeronautical engineering].

G

Boffin at large
Various, southern UK.

Besides excellent links provided by Genghis, the LAA has a number of spreadsheets free to use at this link which are also a good starting point:

You may also be interested to know that the E-go design is progressing as a result of winning the PFA's SSDR competition held in 2008. See:

EuropaBoy
EGBW
6 Posts
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