Overview

Although many members of the AeroDesign Team are aerospace engineers, the team also receives many students eager to design, build, and fly airplanes who don’t necessarily have an already existing passion for them. Civil engineering, finance, and political science are some examples that have joined and made significant contributions to the team.

Many times, these members were not introduced to the foundations of the science of flight. Many concepts, words, and definitions - airfoils, incompressible flow, separation - are completely foreign to them. Even aerospace engineering majors might not have been introduced to these concepts: many members transfer into USC after the first semester of freshman year, so miss the opportunity to take the introductory aerospace course.

With these people in mind, I taught the Basics of Aerospace lecture series in the Spring of 2024.

The Series

I based the content of the series on John D. Anderson’s Introduction to Flight, the same textbook used by the introductory aerospace engineering class at USC. Over the winter of 2024, I split up the content in fourteen unique lectures, to be taught weekly in the spring. Below is the summary (a syllabus of sorts) of the series:

I then re-read key chapters and sections of Anderson’s textbook, and constructed 14 slides to serve as the basis of the content. These were later supplemented with write-ups and other documents appended as I saw fit throughout the semester. A sample lecture is shown below: