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The aircraft design curriculum at the United States Air Force Academy presents conceptual design in terms of nine fundamental technologies or activities, namely customer focus, design synthesis, engineering drawing and geometry modeling, aerodynamic analysis, constraint analysis, mission analysis, sizing, optimization, and performance and cost reporting. This paper describes these nine activities, explains how they fit together in the conceptual design process, and shows how they are taught and learned at USAFA. Examples of student work show the effectiveness of this approach. This paper also provides an overview of the aircraft design course to our own students.

Problem-based learning is gaining popularity as a means of teaching students how to be independent learners and problem-solvers. These abilities make engineering graduates better prepared to become productive engineers. Many engineering curricula lack the flexibility to add sufficient coursework devoted to problem-based learning. A computer software package is described which provides a means of adding problem-based learning experiences to introductory aeronautical engineering courses without adversely impacting course content or student workload. The software provides students with a series of virtual laboratory experiments which cover nearly every important topic in a typical introductory aeronautical engineering course. Each virtual experiment challenges the student to apply aeronautical engineering theory to predict the outcome of the experiment.

A student aircraft design project is described. The project involved designing, building, and flying a radio-controlled aircraft which can lift a maximum amount of weight using a limited amount of power and planform area, as an entry in the SAE Aero Design West competition. The rules of the contest stimulated students to attempt to build a flying-wing aircraft configuration which could use highly-cambered, high-lift airfoils along its entire span. The students' design and analysis process, and the innovative analysis methods they developed to model this unconventional configuration are described. Characteristics of the resulting aircraft are described. The students were successful in building an all-wing aircraft with highly-cambered airfoils across its entire span, however adverse effects of ground effect limited the aircraft's weight-lifting capability to less than half of what the students predicted.