Fall 2020
Overview
I worked with a group of four to design an aerosport airplane following LSA certification requirements along with a series of other design requirements. This was a semester long project that we in our aircraft design course (ME 408). Along with benchmarking competition, we used a excel spreadsheet design tool created by Thomas Corke and edited by our Professor Geiger. In the end we were fairly successful in our design and met most of our design requirements.
We followed Corke's textbook, splitting design into the following sections
Preliminary Take-off weight estimate
Wing loading selection
Main Wing Design
Fuselage Design
Empennage Design
Engine selection
Propeller Design
Take-off and Landing
Enhanced lift devices (flaps)
Material selection and load factor selection
Stability and Control
Cost Estimate
Below is the summary of our design compared our main competitors the Panther LSA and the Pitts Special.
Three View
Below are the design requirements that drove our design. We had excellent turn rates, well above the threshold, however, we weren't able to get our speed up to the threshold 120 ktas.
Our spreadsheet details can be seen here