Flight Dynamics, An Asset to the Department

I would like to share some honest thoughts about Flight D with the readers on this message board to hopefully encourage future students to take this class seriously and excel when they take it.

Quite honestly, if you plan on being an aircraft person, Flight D is one of the single most useful and important classes you will take here at UT. Period. And, I am very tired of listening to people complain about it. In Flight D you learn methods to predict aircraft performance that are rooted in real physics and the equations of motion for an aircraft. These methods are fundamental to later being able to design a quality aircraft. As anyone who has taken Aircraft Design can tell you, design is an iterative process, where by you start with an initial concept, evaluate its performance (what you learn in Flight D), and then use those results to determine what needs to be changed in the aircraft, then repeat that process until you have an aircraft that is as good as it can get. Flight D also teaches you why you need to have certain features on an aircraft, and what their effects are. Truth be told, I would really like to see more integration between Flight D and Aircraft Design, which I think would lead to a much stronger Aerospace department in the future.

In terms of the actual class, Dr. Hull might not be the most thrilling lecturer in history, but he knows his stuff. He's been doing it since before any of we current students were even thought of. He might read straight out of the book during class, but he actually has a very good book that explains things quite well. That said, there are a few mistakes in it, but for the most part they are plainly obvious to the attentive reader (such as forgetting a parenthesis here and there, or copy/paste errors). If you attentively read the book like you are supposed to, you will learn a ton of useful information about aircraft that you will apply time and time again in your later careers. So, main point: read the book and be engaged with what is going on in the class!

People also complain about needing to learn definitions, but here's the thing, definitions are wildly important to know. If you go out in industry and you don't know what the neutral point of an aircraft is and how to design for static stability (a couple examples of definitions from the class), they will look at you like you either wasted your entire time in college, or like you went to a cut-rate university which I assure all of you, we most certainly are not!

Cheers