The College of Aeronautics (CoA) at Cranfield University believes that the best way of teaching design is for the students to learn design by doing it, in a structured manner. It also believes in the maxim - “the devil is in the detail” and that a design is only complete when it has been built, flown and certificated. Designers need to be aware of , and experienced in, all of the intermediate stages between concept design and certification. They also need to be taught to function as members of group design teams, because that is the usual way that Industry works. All of these factors led to the establishment of a full-time Masters programme in Aerospace Vehicle Design, the focus of which is the Group Design Project (GDP). This philosophy was proved to be successful over many years and was continued and expanded in the design of the Masters course in Aircraft Engineering -- the subject of this paper. This programme is a three-year part-time M.Sc. course, which comprises the same major elements as the full-time course. The students attend lecture modules, perform a piece of individual research and work on a GDP. It was this last element that particularly attracted the launch and predominant customer for the course, the then Military Aircraft Division of British Aerospace (BAe). BAe like the basic philosophy of teaching the design process by placing someone in a project group with an individual responsibility but having to cater for the needs of the group and project as a whole. In February 1995 the Aircraft Engineering course was launched with l5 students, who began the first intake, working on major modifications to the CoA's Al Aerobatic aircraft, which itself resulted from work of former students. The GDP on the full-time course in Aerospace Vehicle Design concentrates on the preliminary and detail design of a whole aircraft, which has been previously defined in terms of basic geometry, mass, performance, characteristics etc. by staff However, BAe and Cranfield wished to address a greater extent of the full-design process, as mentioned above. In this way the students would, in the space of three years, be given first-hand experience of a much wider extent of an aerospace project than could ever be the case whilst working on major aircraft projects in a manufacturing company. This paper will give details of the Aircraft Engineering teaching programme and describe the first GDP, a major modification programme and flight of the Cranfield Al Aerobatic Aircraft.
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