Constructing General Aviation Aircraft In The Aerospace Lab Courses

The Aerospace Engineering Department at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, is in the midst of a dynamic experiment to revitalize its “hands on” approach to undergraduate engineering education by introducing aircraft manufacturing and fabrication “kits” into its laboratory curriculum. The challenges and opportunities are many, and the most important are discussed in this paper. They include the enormous difficulty of establishing a recurring lab syllabus for such an endeavor, combined with the lack of faculty expertise in aircraft fabrication that may exist in the department. Traditional projects and grades are also a problem, since failure or sub-standard work to meet any standard for flight is not acceptable. Adequate lab space, resources, specialty tools, and expertise in blueprint analysis are also difficult challenges to meet, especially for the large number of inexperienced students who come into this course at every offering. The way that Cal Poly has been meeting the above challenges is both unique and risky. The recruiting and inclusion of resources from the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), from industry, from the university, and from local hobbyists to help establish these special lab courses is presented, along with very real concerns about liability and safety. Funding needs and workload on faculty and students are also realistically discussed. Student comment and enthusiasm for the work conclude the paper. I. The Challenge and the Opportunity Ideas abound on how to improve technical education by changing America’s culture of teaching. Engineering accreditation teams struggle with how to offer the laboratory experience so that more can share in the benefits of “hands on” activity. One of the primary goals of engineering practice has always been to link theory with practice, and true-life stories of engineering practice are both interesting and profound. Providing the student with his or her own true-life experience while at the academy increases both the motivation to master a subject and the developing passion for creative activity. Technical educators bemoan the fact that some, if not many, of our students do not develop this passion for learning or habit for independent, innovative thought that is at the heart of all professional education. Despite the significant promotion of team activities in engineering colleges, some still view the engineering profession in particular as solitary work in cubicles that consists of reading articles and accessing computer programs for an occasional meeting. This view matches and is reinforced by much of their academic experience in the classroom. The link between theory and practice may be spoken but seldom experienced for these students. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference * Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 10346.1 As shrinking budgets cause an ever greater part of undergraduate laboratory education to be computer centered, and as a greater percentage of students enter the curriculum without practical experience in mechanics or a familiarity with tools and tooling, there is a strong need to expose aerospace engineering students to these realities of the aviation workplace, a workplace that traditionally has inspired a passionate intensity. The Aerospace Engineering Department at Cal Poly is trying to provide hands-on skills and foster this intensity, at reasonable cost, by using special lab courses to construct modern general aviation aircraft (or to construct parts of aircraft) normally offered to the public in “kit” form. There is surprisingly little information in the technical literature on this subject except for trade publication articles and web site narratives. Isolated projects involving “kit” aircraft, such as the “roadable aircraft,” have been described , and NASA funds a program called “AGATE” to revitalize general aviation, but there are no specific guideposts for actually implementing “kit” aircraft into existing aerospace engineering curricula. In a humble spirit, the purpose of this document is to provide a few of these guideposts. I.1 Course Objectives It has been important from the outset that the course strive for more than merely turning students into kit builders, though that may certainly be one of the outcomes. Here are the official course objectives of Aero 572, Aircraft Manufacturing and Fabrication, that is offered two quarters of every academic year: “The objectives of this course are to provide a hands-on demonstration and practice of the techniques used in aircraft manufacturing and fabrication. This may include, but is not limited to, seminar topics, field trips to aircraft designers, and actual construction of an aircraft. The primary purpose of the course is to compliment the capstone aircraft design sequence and give selected students significant exposure to aircraft fabrication techniques. By its nature this requires a team orientation, exposure to most if not all engineering disciplines as they relate to flight, and a systems view of planning, task scheduling, documentation, and testing. Students completing this course will be able to: (1) explain fundamental manufacturing and fabrication techniques used for aircraft made of metal or of composites; (2) implement the types of fabrication processes used by industry and by small aircraft builders, and document their own progress using established procedures; (3) demonstrate expertise in reading aircraft plans and construction diagrams, especially as the complete aircraft comes together; (4) analyze how modifications and errors impact fabrication time and cost; (5) integrate aircraft construction with FAA certification, safety, systems testing, and (if appropriate) flight simulation.” These objectives conform to what is often called Bloom’s taxonomy of learning (see Appendix). Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference * Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 10346.2