Information
about Career
By Dinesh Kamath
Aeronautical
Engineer
Introduction
Aeronautical Engineers are widely employed by airlines, aircraft
manufacturers, aircraft leasing companies, companies involved in the
maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) of aircraft, the aeronautical sections of
government departments and in aeronautical research establishments.
Aeronautical Engineers in the Department of Communications are
classified as Aeronautical Officers.
Aerospace engineering is the primary branch of engineering
concerned with the design, construction, and science of aircraft and
spacecraft. It is divided into two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical
engineering and astronautical engineering. The former deals with aircraft that
operate in Earth's atmosphere, and the latter with spacecraft that operate
outside it.
Aerospace engineering deals with the design, construction, and
study of the science behind the forces and physical properties of aircraft,
rockets, flying craft, and spacecraft. The field also covers their aerodynamic
characteristics and behaviors, airfoil, control surfaces, lift, drag, and other
properties.
Aeronautical engineering was the original term for the field. As
flight technology advanced to include craft operating in outer space, the
broader term "aerospace engineering" has largely replaced it in
common usage. Aerospace engineering, particularly the astronautics branch, is
often referred to colloquially as "rocket science", although this is
a popular misnomer.
Overview
Flight vehicles are subjected to demanding conditions such as
those produced by extreme changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature, with
structural loads applied upon vehicle components. Consequently, they are
usually the products of various technological and engineering disciplines
including aerodynamics, propulsion, avionics, materials science, structural
analysis and manufacturing. The interaction between these technologies is known
as aerospace engineering. Because of the number of disciplines involved,
aerospace engineering is carried out by teams of engineers, each having their
own specialised area of expertise.
The development and manufacturing of a modern flight vehicle is
an extremely complex process and demands careful balance and compromise between
abilities, design, available technology and costs. Aerospace engineers design,
test, and supervise the manufacture of aircraft, spacecraft, and missiles.
Aerospace engineers develop new technologies for use in aviation, defense
systems, and space.
History
The origin of aerospace engineering can be traced back to the
aviation pioneers around the late 19th to early 20th centuries, although the
work of Sir George Cayley has recently been dated as being from the last decade
of the 18th to mid-19th century. One of the most important people in the
history of aeronautics, Cayley was a pioneer in aeronautical engineering and is
credited as the first person to separate the forces of lift and drag, which are
in effect on any flight vehicle. Early knowledge of aeronautical engineering
was largely empirical with some concepts and skills imported from other
branches of engineering. Scientists understood some key elements of aerospace engineering,
like fluid dynamics, in the 18th century. Many years later after the successful
flights by the Wright brothers, the 1910s saw the development of aeronautical
engineering through the design of World War I military aircraft.
The first definition of aerospace engineering appeared in
February 1958. The definition considered the Earth's atmosphere and the outer
space as a single realm, thereby encompassing both aircraft (aero) and
spacecraft (space) under a newly coined word aerospace. The National Aeronautics
and Space Administration was founded in 1958 as a response to the Cold War. United States aerospace engineers launched the
first American satellite on January 31, 1958 in response to the USSR
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