My experience in industry has taught me that there are three main phases of any UAV initial development program where an aeronautical or aerodynamics specialist is most valuable. I’d even argue that these are phases where having a specialist is CRITICAL to program success: conceptual design, wind tunnel testing, and flight testing.
Phase #1: Conceptual Design
This is where you take your high-level requirements for the mission and the product and use them to come to a conclusion on what your aircraft should look like. You or your aero engineer should be answering questions like:
- What wing area do we need to fly our target weight, and what shape should it be?
- What airfoil gives us the best performance at our main flight condition?
- How big of tails do we need? How many and where should (or can) they be?
You can probably get away with figuring all this out by looking through textbooks.
But if you have an even slightly unusual configuration or any stakeholders that you need to impress, you really ought to have a dedicated aerodynamics engineer to lead this.
Phase #2: Wind Tunnel Testing
You can do all the CFD you want, but in my Very Strong Opinion you don’t truly understand your aircraft until you stick it in a wind tunnel. It’s the closest you can get to actually flying it, and you can measure almost anything you want while it’s “flying” in the tunnel.
Any data you get from this testing feeds into literally every other data and analysis source you have: your CFD, your controls simulations, your operator training, all of it. Your investment in time and money here pays dividends for your whole program, both now and into the future (which is worth its own dedicated discussion).
Having an aeronautical engineer here helps you figure out:
- What you need to test
- What data you need to collect
- How to test to collect this data, and
- What the heck to do with it afterwards
If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “wind tunnel” is one of those indoor skydiving places…you probably need someone with a bit more experience to help you do this.
Phase #3: Flight Testing
You can take a new UAV out and fly it around for a bit and decide it’s great. Awesome!
But how do you know it can meet the performance requirements we talked about in the conceptual design phase? Are you able to use the reams of telemetry data you just generated, or are they just going to sit on your servers forever?
Having an aeronautical specialist here (especially the same one you used for your conceptual design) can address these exact questions. They can take that telemetry and use it to better predict your mission performance, revising your fuel burn and endurance estimates. They can tell you if your control surfaces are under or oversized, or if your aircraft’s rate of climb leaves something to be desired.
There’s a lot you can learn from the actual operators on these test flights, and you absolutely should sit with them to discuss their qualitative evaluation.
But if you want anything quantitative, i.e. data-based, and you want to validate your performance requirements without having to actually do a 10-hour flight, you’ll want an aeronautical engineer.
By no means are these the only phases of a development effort where you can, and should, have an aero engineer. There is a LOT of value in having one available during other phases! But that discussion starts to get more nuanced, and this email is more than long enough already.
I admit I probably just hit you with way more specific, technical information than you’ve been used to seeing from me! Absolutely let me know if there’s anything in here that you’re curious about or would like to better understand. I live and breathe this stuff, so I love answering questions from folks who aren’t as immersed in this world as I am.