To provide quality design education I found the need to supplement the material currently available. This has resulted in the creation of a number of reports that are made available to the students. Most importantly, even a book written by a configuration designer had scant information on how to actually start a design. What do you do when you put down that first piece of blank paper? Fortunately, I convinced Nathan Kirschbaum (An interesting story in itself, we convinced the former chief of configuration design at Grumman to retire to Blacksburg and become an adjunct faculty member. Schools that don't exploit these possibilities are squandering a key resource of real world engineering knowledge.) to write such a document (Kirschbaum, 1992). It is the Aircraft Design Handbook: Aircraft Design Aid and Layout Guide, and a small subset will be placed on our design class web page soon.
A second need was to collect sources of design material for students to start searching for information. This evolved into the Aircraft Design Information Sources report (Mason, 1993). The AIAA distributed the February 1994 version of this report to all AIAA student chapters in 1994. Although this report provides a starting point, there is a built-in lag in its contents. Special material discovered during the design project of a particular year only appears in the next year's version. This document was placed on-line on our www page. The need for frequent change makes it a natural for this approach.
Another in the series of educational materials is a control power requirements report (Kay, 1993), which provides students with a way to assess configurations early in the design process. The procedures are simple and use a spreadsheet, so that students are directly involved in the evaluation. The goal is to provide them with maximum insight into the connection between design parameters and FAR and Military requirements. This consideration seemed to be a serious weakness in our stability and control course. However, the problem of evaluating designs against military standards is now being included in that course, and an even better version of the software using MATLAB is being developed. This approach has generated considerable interest in industry and government in addition to the design class application.