I've used both ProEngineer and Solidworks, and there's no competition. Maybe because I'd learned ProEngineer first, but Solidworks was excellent. The GUI was considerably more intuitive than ProE, Solidworks let me do what I wanted to do without giving me a billion caution and warning messages, and included really nice tutorials. The only thing I can complain about is the intent manager, as it's called, which guesses what you're trying to do. Some times it's right, other times it's putting constraints and relations on things I didn't want it to do. It took me a day to learn Solidworks on my own using the tutorials, and a bit longer to really get the hang of it. By comparison, ProE had almost a flat learning curve. Despite having a textbook on how to use it, I spent way more time trying to find buttons or trying to find what ProE was complaining about. In short, it's as if with Solidworks you're designing, and with ProE you're using CAD software. ProE is definitely a bit more advanced than Solidworks and I've heard it's better for large assemblies. But, unless your homebuilding something that could be certified as a 525 type aircraft, I'd think that Solidworks is more than sufficient. However, it's not free and I'm only using it as I got a free copy from my university. I think it's a bit pricy, but then again if you're building an actual aircraft a $200 on software isn't going to be a bad idea. I've built what I designed in Solidworks before, and it worked perfectly (...almost, I missed a little detail but it wasn't that important
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Another option is as mentioned AutoCAD Inventor. I just started playing with it, and it's not too bad. Not quite as easy to use as a Solidworks, but it's better than ProE. There's a free academic version availiable online, so as long as your a "student" you'll get a freebie copy.
