inigo88
Composite-lover
That’s two things we have in common! Aerospace Engineering and SAR.
It’s definitely not for everybody but I’ve really enjoyed the ride so far. What you end up doing in a career will likely be vastly different than how it was portrayed in college as well. Where college degree programs focus a ton on aerodynamics and design-build-fly in the last year, the reality is there is a tiny niche amount of aero people compared with the army of engineers required to detail design structural parts, design mechanisms, route subsystems, analyze and write stress reports for all the above, model and develop flight control systems and write all the software to make it all work. Making an airplane is super complicated and requires a ton of different disciplines to come together - and thus it’s kind of unrealistic for one person to understand the intricacies of all the disciplines.
Throughout the process though I’ve remained passionate about preliminary and conceptual design (the “napkin sketch” stage where you first dream up a new airplane) even though it’s also a small niche in the field, because to do it well you need to be a generalist and know a little bit about all the disciplines to make informed initial assumptions and come to the best compromises on requirements to give your design its best shot at success. I really respect and admire those who did this process so well like Kelly Johnson, Jack Northrop, Burt Rutan and lesser known names like Dan Raymer and Jan Roskam (both of whom make excellent textbooks on the subject). So while I’m not an aero guy I tried to approach the question in a more wholistic way (as an overall airplane configuration question vs an aero question), and I’m glad you enjoyed it!
