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Aeronautical Engineering degree for amateurs

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fadec

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 18, 2011
Messages
105
Location
New Zealand
I've been researching engineering degrees and aircraft design as a career with the long term goal of designing and building my own aircraft.

Here is a short summary of some thoughts that others have mentioned regarding degrees and design engineering, followed by a question which may help those interested in pursuing the amateur self-study route.

(Caution: gross generalisations may follow)

If you want employment as an aviation engineer then you must have a degree.

At a professional level, a degree plus 5 years industry experience is the rough minimum to start producing workable designs of your own (yes thats 9 years before you can put pen to paper folks)

Places for aerospace engineering degrees are competitive so if your academic history is less than stellar for whatever reason then tough luck. I also notice that some universities have been restricting the number of places recently further exacerbating the problem, but you can consol yourself with the thought that it's not unknown for the upper academic tier to be surprisingly poor at designing and building things.

An important part of the degree process is access to work experience/internships so if you live somewhere with a non existent aviation industry then once again tough luck.

There are very few (if any?) aeronautical engineering degrees that focus on subsonic civil aviation as opposed to aerospace degrees (an ego thing perhaps).

Few people with AE degrees actually end up working in the area that they really interested in (assuming they even find employment within the aviation industry).

An AE degree seems to be optimised for analysis and optimisation of designs whereas a Mechanical Engineering degree is better suited for generating the designs in the first place.

An aerospace degree won't actually teach you how to design an aircraft, but it will give you the theoretical grounding to learn how to do so once out in the industry.

Much of what is studied/learned at university is not actually used in real world aircraft design.

If someone didn't want to or wasn't able to pursue aircraft design at a professional level then a full time degree seems a very expensive and inefficient learning tool but a grounding in engineering maths and physics etc is still necessary.

My question for those who are practicing engineers or hold engineering degrees is this: If you could remove all of the irrelevant or unutilised papers/subjects or parts thereof in a degree what would you be left with? what are the good bits? If you just wanted the knowledge and not the certificate at the end?

I ask this with relation to aeronautical design within the general/sport/experimental aviation sector so I think we can safely cull space vehicle theory and social science elective papers for a start...
 
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