MAE3402: Aerospace design project

As Jinxi mentioned, all the groups were random, lucky for me I was grouped with a friend which meant that 2/9 people were actually working rather than me solo this project. Long story short, 1 person on the team plagiarised last years work (even the layout was the same...), 1 person afked for the first 6/7 weeks, everyone else was decent/ok/trash, Hugh is an asshole and be prepared to lose sleep the week before its due. If you're doing this unit I suggest doing the high priority things yourself (such as weight analysis, CG calculation and constraint analysis) and don't forget, ITS OK TO CRY SOMETIMES!!

50% Design Project (35% Final Report, 10% Concept Report, 5% Presentation), 50% Final Exam

Me and a few of my friend had really high expectations of this unit after hearing about it from the previous cohort (Unit was taken by Daniel Mitchell in 2013). We've formed our group of 8 members before the semester started, and began conceptualizing ideas, planning our timetables and brushing up on our specialization (each of us in the group were good in something). Come's first week, Hugh walks in and announces that this year, the groups will be allocated randomly which caused a huge uproar. When asked why he simply said there were too many good groups and too many bad groups in the previous year and so he wanted to even out the field. I would be fine if it was a small assignment, but for 50% with 8 randoms? Hugh tried to justify his choice by saying that we have to work with different type of people in the workforce, and was met with the retort of the year:"But retards won't get a job in the Aerospace Industry". He just smirked and went on with this lectures.

Let me tell you, pray to god that you have a decent group and a couple of hardworking members in your group. Meeting were impossible to schedule and the only time we had all 8 members present was during the presentation (One member didn't bother to show up to sign the coversheet of the final submission report and got 0, which was fair cause he didn't do anything) Only 2-3 members were working in each group, and say goodbye to your sleep leading up to the final report submission. The week prior to the submission, the earliest I left uni was 3am in the morning and coming back to uni no later than 9am for 5 consecutive days. On the day before submission, I brought my toothbrush and stayed throughout the night. It definitely wouldn't be so hectic if everyone in the team pulled their weight, but naturally, that will never be the case in a group of 8 randoms.

We had to design a lame Short-Take off and Landing (STOL) amphibious fire fighting aircraft for our year while the previous year got to design a space tourism aircraft (not unlike what space X/virgin galactic is doing)...The final report is going to include alot of details, and will be well over 150 pages, with some groups going over 250 pages. You will need literature review, solidworks, flow simulations, matlab, design calculations, basically everything that you've learnt previously.

The lectures were really really boring as hugh basically faces the slides and reads off them. The amount of information on the slides doesn't help too as it's filled to the brim with calculations and words. My advice is to just skip the lectures completely and read the slides. Attendance were a record low for this unit and barely achieves 10 people on good days.

After the hell of finishing off the final report, you have to look forward to the presentations where Hugh will try his absolute best to pick out flaws in your design instead of giving constructive criticism. Past that, you have the final exam to look forward to which was incredibly hard in previous years and got us panicking as many of us were focused on the project and fell way behind in tutorials and lectures (I started doing my first tutorial sheet in swotvac). Luckily for us, the 2014 exam was reasonably simple and straightforward.

Anyway, the unit inspired me to make this image of our design.

Prof. Hugh Blackburn

Yes, dating back to 2009 with solutions.

1 out of 5

No

Library

3 x 1hr lectures, 1 x 2hr tutorial (Optional)

2014, Sem 2

Pending