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Professional Services

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AVI

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2003
Messages
526
Location
Banff, AB
Professional services ... and we're not talking the Red Light District in Amsterdam here ... now that would be an interesting spin-off on this thread.

Thanks, Orion and Othman for jumping in. Since both of you are aerospace engineers, how about expounding on the services of a professional? When/where in the stages of design/construction would amateurs such as myself find it prudent to call in the cavalry?

There are suffiicient designs of successful, composite aircraft available for examination, both scratch-built as in the case of the Long EZ, Cozy and Vision, and kitplanes such as the Lanceair and Glasair, to name a couple, for an amateur to research and establish simple "eyeball" calculations regarding skin lamination, sandwich construction material, etc., with which to rough out a simple composite design. The "Monkey see, monkey do" school of design. There is also sufficient information published for an amateur to size a composite spar and to calculate the strength of critical hardware such as wing-to-fuselage attachments.

So, which would you say are the critical components and at what stage of the design would it be prudent for the amateur to seek the advice/help of a professional to verify the design or parts of the design?For example, I would think it prudent to have the spar calculations verified by a professional, especially on an aircraft intended for aerobatics, and perhaps the wing attachment hardware as previously mentioned, but from your professional perspective, what other components would you consider critical, and what advice would you have for an amateur? How best would you be able to help him/her without getting into megabuck cost overruns as outlined by Othman?
This also brings up another question: would a professional even consider designing/verifying the calculations of one component of the aircraft such as a wing, for example, without being responsible for the overall design?

We're looking at it from the viewpoint of an amateur with the desire to build one airplane, not from that of a potential kitplane manufacturer, so it's definitely a bare bones type of retainer. We certainly would not be designing a space shuttle, just something simple like a two-seat, low wing hi performance single with retractable gear. Not a space shuttle, but not a hang glider either.

Let's hear it from you two pros.
 
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