AIAA Meeting

We went to a local AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) meeting last night. We don't normally go to these, but this one sounded interesting. The purpose of the meeting was to present the annual AIAA Aircraft Design Award to one of our former college professors, Dr. Jan Roskam. It's a pretty big award that's normally given out at the world conference that happens once a year, but as he was unable to make it to the conference this year, they arranged to give it to him at our local Wichita chapter. Past recipients include Ben Rich (Lockheed Skunk Works) and Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites), so he's in some pretty famous company now. Anyway, he gave a lecture titled, "Recent Aircraft Design Lessons... Learned?" which was interesting. He tells "war stories" which are descriptions of accidents and near misses that could or should have been prevented with better design, and that's what this lecture was about. He went over ten recent accidents/incidents and what should have been done in the original design to prevent them, or in some cases, what we can learn from the mistake. It was a bit odd to sit through another lecture from an old teacher though - I felt like we had to pay extra special attention, sit up straight, stuff like that. You know, try to be the good student again.

When we were in school, this guy was our most feared professor. He would do things like return our tests with pink slips (i.e. drop slips) attached to them if we didn't do well on the test; a not so subtle hint that we should either shape up or drop out of aerospace engineering. We had to write five reports that averaged a couple hundred pages a piece for one of his classes. One of our classmates was so nervous before one of our tests that he threw up when the test was handed out. Anyway, he was certainly intimidating, but he was also a really good teacher, and he handed out the type of practical information that has helped us most in our careers. I'm glad we had him as a teacher, because it seems that those of us who have been through his classes are a bit more aware of all the issues and things that need to be checked in a new airplane design than some other engineers we've worked with that went through different schools that focused more on theory than practical design.