Intro to Fixed-Wing Aircraft Design
Want to be a player in the drone industry?
Interested in designing and building aircraft?
Need to develop an aircraft for complex missions?
Aircraft designers Doug Hunsaker and Sam Weiss give you
an overview of their methods for aircraft design.
This mini course will teach you:
- How to design to mission requirements
- How to perform basic sizing of the airframe
- How to select an appropriate propulsion system
- How to do basic airfoil analysis
- How to maximize the aerodynamic efficiency of your airframe
- How to design for manufacturing
What are the requirements?
- Students should understand that this is a mini course that covers only a handful of key topics for aircraft design. It is not a complete program that will teach you everything about designing an airplane.
- Students will need a basic computer with a web browser
- Students will need a background in math including algebra and some trigonometry
- Students should understand the definitions of aircraft parts, such as fuselage, stabilizer, control surface, rudder, aileron, etc.
What am I going to get from this course?
- Over 35 lectures and 2 hours of videos
- A framework for designing your own aircraft
- An understanding of tradeoffs for mission requirements
- An understanding of the relationships between aircraft design parameters
- The ability to choose topics to review that are of most interest to you
Who is the target audience?
- Students with limited engineering background and no aircraft design experience
- Tenured engineers who want to learn about the effects of design decisions
- Pilots who want to tweak their airframes
- Entrepreneurs who want to develop a drone for a specific application