Welcome, We’re two aircraft designers who have been designing manned and unmanned aircraft for several years. We absolutely love designing airplanes, and we both feel lucky to live in this awesome age when aircraft design is needed so badly.
By way of quick introduction, Doug has been involved in aircraft design since 2003 when he helped design and fly an 8-inch airplane in the international micro-air vehicle competition. He later interned for Aerovironment and Sandia National Labs, developed aircraft design software, and taught aerodynamics and flight mechanics courses during his graduate degree. After graduation, he had the awesome opportunity of landing a job with Scaled Composites, where he worked on the SpaceShipTwo and Stratolaunch airframes. He then consulted for Facebook on their high-altitude long-endurance aircraft. He is now an Associated Professor at Utah State University and conducts research on aerodynamic design, analysis, and optimization.
Sam has been designing, building, and flying aircraft since he was very young. He interned at Scaled Composites working on the SpaceShipTwo program and spent three years as a lead airframe designer for AggieAir. He now owns his own company, Purpose-Built Drones, which designs, builds, and tests airframes. He has written various aircraft design and analysis tools and is passionate about developing the best tools for the industry.
As electronics have become cheaper and batteries more powerful, small unmanned aircraft have become the next big thing. This industry is worth billions of dollars. That’s billions (with a “b”) not millions. :)
The need for drones is very obvious in several industries. Drones are being used for agriculture, search and rescue, border patrol, fire fighting, news, traffic monitoring, pipeline monitoring, package delivery, and much more. They range in size from airframes the size of airliners to airframes small enough to fly indoors.
So, what does this mean? It means it’s an aircraft designer’s playground.
It means we now get to take all the lessons learned over the past 100 years of manned flight and apply them to aircraft that need to be designed for missions we haven’t yet even imagined.
Because we don’t have to worry about human limitations onboard the aircraft, the design space for unmanned aircraft is much broader than it has been in the past. What’s more, one size of an airplane does not fit all missions. That means that a host of mission-specific airframes will need to be designed in the coming years.
In short, we live in perhaps the best time in history to be an aircraft designer. Our generation has:
the best tools for designing aircraft,
the best technology to put on aircraft,
the best manufacturing processes for building aircraft,
and the most exciting missions to design towards.
In this class, you’ll learn the fundamentals of taking an idea from mission concept and what we call a “napkin sketch”, through initial sizing and design, to a fully viable aerodynamic design.
This process is usually taught as a senior-level course in engineering. Our goal is to take that content and whittle it down to the most fundamental principles that can be understood by anyone with a basic understanding of math and maybe a hint of physics.
Really – if you have a high-school diploma, you should do fine in this class. We’ll talk you through each principle and explain it so you can understand and apply it yourself.
And we’ll pull from our own practical experience to help you avoid pitfalls and common mistakes. We hope it will be a fun and rewarding journey for all of us. Before we go on, just a quick note about higher education: For the record, we both believe in the value of university education.
The experiences we’ve had as engineering students have been unbelievably rewarding. We’d encourage anyone who is thinking about getting an engineering degree to do it. Seriously. Go do it. Get it done. It’s well worth it and will open a host of opportunities for you. But let us reassure you that you don’t need a degree to understand this course. We want you to take this course so you can start designing airplanes now, no matter your level of education or field of study. Why? Because it’s cool. And fun. And rewarding. So… let’s get started.