of the
Georgia
Institute of Technology
Preparing a strategic plan provides an
opportunity to review the context in which the professional activity is
conducted and for reexamining the assumptions underlying the plans for that
activity. That kind of review is,
perhaps, more appropriate for aerospace engineering education (AE), than for
many other fields, and at this time, more than in earlier years.
The aerospace industry has, historically, been cyclic. In the past, this resulted both from the
dominant role of the several defense departments as funding agencies, and the
variable levels of congressional support for defense over time, as threats to
national interests were perceived as greater or less. During periods of low defense funding,
employment opportunities receded, AE enrollments dropped, and the smaller AE
departments on college campuses often were eliminated or combined with other
departments. Now, just short of 96 years
after man’s first flight in a powered, heavier-than-air machine, the cyclic
aspects may be changing. The defense
components of aerospace development are no longer dominant. Commercial transport aircraft and general
aviation aircraft businesses produce combined cash flows which have become
greater than defense procurements; space activities have both the governmental
and scientific components supported by NASA and, also, burgeoning commercial
developments; and specialty applications of aeronautics, such as crop-dusting,
oil exploration and police surveillance, account for increasing unit
sales. While the consolidation of prime
contractors continues to attract widespread attention, the number of aerospace
engineering activities remains very high, when fixed and rotary wing aircraft;
turbine and rocket engine; launch satellite and reentry space vehicles; and
missile and uninhabited air vehicles (UAV’s) are all
accounted for.
The stability of the industry aside, one
might well ask, “Why should a university like Georgia Tech devote substantial
resources to aerospace engineering education?”
Answers supporting the affirmative should then be followed by
descriptions of such a program’s educational character, its focus, and the current
assumptions upon which a new strategic plan is based. Some of these aspects are dealt with in what
follows:
A.
Why Aerospace Engineering?
The importance of aerospace engineering
can be thought of as beginning with national security. Control of the skies is essential to the
well-being of ground forces and civilians.
Force projection, rapidly and over great distances, relies on aerospace
technology. So do surveillance and
communications. The aerospace
engineering enterprise is also a major national economic factor. In providing employment and tax revenues,
business travel capabilities, and the largest single source of positive balance
of international payments for our country, the aerospace industry contributes
tremendously to the national economy.
Certainly in our state, the presence and vitality of Delta Airlines;
Lockheed Martin’s LMAS in
The exponential
growth in tourism and business travel also makes it clear how profoundly
aerospace technology affects the quality of life. It is easily understood, if less than
explicit, in the often-repeated statement that, “we are a mobile society”. Philosophically, for those who choose to or
must travel substantial distances often — and for whom “getting there is not
half the fun” — the reduced time of travel is the equivalent of a lengthened
life span through aerospace engineering.
Finally, and
perhaps most important, the opening of the doorway to space exploration and
travel has inspired men and women to dream of adventures beyond the everyday
and commonplace like nothing since, perhaps, Lindberg’s solo flight across the
Atlantic. The robotic exploits of such
programs as the Mars rover are certainly exciting, but mankind has never been
satisfied with vicarious experiences.
Many of the best and brightest of this nation’s new generation aspire
personally to becoming travelers, even sojourners, in space.
B.
Why Aerospace Engineering Education at Georgia Tech?
The nature of aerospace engineering is today, more than
ever, eminently suitable for the higher education mission of a research
university. Aerospace vehicles are complex systems consisting of the complex
integration of subsystems. Market forces
dictate that no new aerospace system design will be developed to the point of
service use unless it is superior to existing designs. Few, if any aerospace systems will be
operated if they do not meet rigid standards of
reliability, safety, environmental compatibility, cost and performance. Taken together, these facts make for an
enterprise which must be creative, innovative, intellectually
rigorous and one which must return routinely to the well-spring of fundamental,
scientific methods and knowledge to meet its goals. Beyond these aspects,
however, aerospace engineering provides, to a greater extent than any other
field, the vehicles which open the gateways to exploration and adventure, For all
these reasons, aerospace engineering remains a challenging field, and this is
uniquely exciting, to young people especially.
These same challenges also result in spin-offs of aerospace engineering
advances into useful applications in other fields and in becoming a driving
force for other technologies.
The education of an aerospace engineer,
because of the nature of the aerospace engineering enterprise, as noted above,
must be fundamental, to allow its practitioners to constantly be
expanding the field’s boundaries. It
must be broad and multifaceted, to allow the integrative assembly of
systems. It must impart an appreciation
for and abilities in optimization, recognizing the importance of risks, life-cycle
costs and other financial aspects. It
must develop understanding of and skills for experimentation, both as
required to validate the results of theory, analysis
and design and also as a process of discovery of aspects unanticipated when
analyses were formulated. And finally,
it should encourage the kind of technological open-mindedness that seeks
to exploit the benefits of advances in other fields to the benefit of the
specific aerospace engineering, professional task at hand. This usually entails the ability and
willingness to learn something of new fields; material science and engineering
is a time-honored example, information technology a more recent one.
Although aerospace engineering consists
of system concept formulation, design, manufacture, testing and operations, and
although emphasizing “system of systems” aspects is one of its hallmarks,
taking students to the same level of knowledge for all the components which
make up aerospace systems is clearly not possible in a four-year
curriculum. In fact, doing so rather
than imparting knowledge and skills to great depth in a sub-specialty would
probably be inadvisable, regardless of the time devoted to education beyond the
four years of an undergraduate program.
Accordingly, we will choose for our School’s educational and research
focus aerospace vehicles; their aerodynamics, structures, propulsion and
on-board power systems, flight path stability and control, aeroelasticity
and conceptual design. Where vehicle
design impacts operating system design/development/test and operation, such as
in air traffic management, navigation and communications, we may concern
ourselves with the vehicle – outside systems integration, but not with the
outside systems themselves. Where
vehicle design is impacted by the application of avionics — automatic systems
using sensors, linkages (i.e., “buses”), processors and actuators — we will
concern ourselves with how these avionics are to be used and their integration
into the vehicle design, not with the design of the “black boxes” or
antennas. So called “smart materials”
actuators are, for the present, an exception, because of their close
relationships to airframe/engine structures and their present early stage of development. And, as a final example,
while we plan to exploit the burgeoning developments in Information Technology
to the benefit of aerospace vehicles (and the delivery of our
education), we will not be engaged in the development of Information Technology
for its own sake.
On the other hand, we do intend to deal
with aircraft of all kinds: fixed and rotary wing (i.e. helicopters and other
vertical take off and landing aircraft), aerodynamically controlled missiles,
both micro and macro Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s),
and “aircraft” which are considered for flight in planetary atmospheres. Similarly, we intend as full involvement as
possible with spacecraft and ballistic flight, including ballistic missiles and
vehicles, space launch, in-orbit satellites, interplanetary transport and the
so-called “reëntry” and atmospheric transfer orbit
vehicles, their design, crucial sub-disciplines and subsystem integration.
(1.) Aerospace engineering advances are essential
to national defense and economic competitiveness.
(2.) Important advances in the state of the art of
aerospace engineering can be generated on world class university campuses.
(3.) A continuous replenishment of the aerospace
engineering personnel pool is necessary to the health of the nation’s aerospace
enterprises.
(4.) The nation’s aerospace engineering needs will
generate demand for substantial numbers of aerospace engineers, in the future,
as they have in the past, with fluctuation in demand, and their unique
expertise will be increasingly as system integrators.
(5.) The need for a master’s degree will continue
to grow relative to the number of graduates who leave college with a Bachelor’s
degree, and substantial numbers of doctoral degree holders will still be
required for leadership positions in industry and government, as well as in
academia.
(6.) A reduction in the number of aerospace
engineering schools on the nation’s campuses is likely, leaving the stronger
schools increasingly dominant.
(7.) Georgia Tech’s contributions to both
aerospace engineering advances and the pool of outstanding young aerospace
engineers are and can increasingly be of major importance.
(8.) A proper aerospace engineering education has
broad, worthwhile applications in many areas of endeavor.
(9.) The best products of the nation’s education
system, grades K through 12, including young men and women of all races and cultural
backgrounds, are sufficiently well prepared to undertake a college level
education in aerospace engineering.
(10.) The
resources that can be made available to the
(11.) The plan
of the
III.
The mission of the
A. To provide capable, motivated, and
well-prepared students with an aerospace engineering education of the highest
quality, that will enable them to reach their maximum potential in a
technological world
B. To significantly advance knowledge, its
applications and integration in aerospace related disciplines
C. To serve the larger community of which we are
a part, where our abilities can be uniquely useful.
IV. Vision Statement
Our vision for the
We
see ourselves as:
A. Constituting a School dedicated to
excellence in all we do
B. Preeminent in aerospace engineering education
C. Instilling in our students a sense of
responsibility for ethical practice and of concern for the environment
D. Leading the wider aerospace community within
advances in the sub-disciplines in which we concentrate
E. Adapting to
changes in societal needs so that the education we provide and advances in
knowledge we achieve are continually relevant and important to our country for
the foreseeable future in every era.
We dedicate
ourselves to:
A. Making our educational program
inspirational, nurturing of creativity, and such that the best young people
aspiring to contribute to the aerospace engineering enterprise and to rise to
positions of leadership, whether in industry, government or academia, will seek
to study in our School.
B. Creating a learning
and working environment attractive to all who can profit from studying with us;
one that eases transition to college life for entrants and facilitates
continuing life-long learning for professionals.
C. Building a School whose physical
environment -- facilities, equipment, offices, classrooms and laboratories – and
quality of essential services encourage the
accomplishment of all of our goals and make for a pleasant and personally
rewarding workplace.
D. Making the activities of our School and the
way we conduct them such that colleagues from other universities and our
counterparts in industry and government laboratories will routinely come to
interact with us, to discuss the aerospace field’s:
(1.)
exciting new opportunities
(2.)
problems and new methods for their solution
(3.)
the
constantly evolving content and delivery of courses
(4.) research that is
both at the cutting edge and applicable to satisfying societal needs.
E. Performing our chosen instructional,
research and service tasks so as to strengthen Georgia Tech, both by our
contributions as an individual school and through our support of and
collaboration with other components of the Georgia Tech family.
F. Rising to relevant opportunities to
productively cross traditional disciplinary lines, and to eliminating barriers
to interdisciplinary cooperation in aerospace matters.
G. Acting, in all things, so as to recognize
that the ethnic, racial and gender distribution of our national workplace is
changing, and that a faculty, staff and student body whose constituents reflect
this diversity will better prepare graduates to take their places in its midst.
This section cites the steps seen at this time as those most
likely to enable the School to reach the seven objectives listed in Part
V. Where it is appropriate, quantitative
goals are listed to be accomplished by the year 2003. While the entirety of the plan is viewed as
requiring rather continuous assessment and change, so that it is, in fact, a
living document, this section — dealing as it does, with implementation — is
the one part of the plan most likely to be added to or modified, as the
effectiveness of individual actions are evaluated.
A. Making our
educational program inspirational, nurturing of creativity, and such that the
best young people aspiring to contribute to the aerospace engineering
enterprise and to rise to positions of leadership, whether in industry,
government or academia, will seek to study in our School.
(1.) continue to “raise the bar” in attracting and
retaining the best, brightest and most productive faculty members possible, who
will strengthen the School’s activities in areas which our faculty have
identified as important to the field.
Fill the L-M and Boeing term chairs,
the open position in propulsion/combustion, the David and Andrew Lewis Space
Technology senior chair, and add an experimentalist in aerodynamics.
(2.)
add an “honors” program which graduates, in
five years, students with both BS and MS degrees, certifying them as having
unusually good preparation for specific specialties in the field.
Have four specialty honors curricula
defined and implemented; Graduate 10 honors students a year.
(3.)
establish an active
program of faulty development which consciously and deliberately provides our
faculty opportunities for appointments
to national advisory board memberships and opens lines of communications for
them to leaders in the field, as well as opportunities for entrepreneurship
training.
Increase
the number of AIAA fellows to 1/3, the number of NAE members to 1/5, the faculty. Reduce
the number of course sections met by AE faculty fully active in research to 1
per term.
(4.)
Build an endowment for support of graduate
student fellowships.
Increase the funds available to the
School for this purpose to $300,000/yr., corresponding to a $5 million
dedicated endowment (in 1999 dollars).
Raise the Ph.D. production average from 0.5 to 0.75 per faculty member per
year.
(5.)
Strengthen our aerodynamics expertise through
incorporating an aeroacoustics component, our
propulsion/combustion specialty by adding turbomachinery
expertise, our space offerings and research with a specialty in satellite
vehicle design, and by developing our avionics integration activities.
(6.)
Expand on the limited international activities
we’ve had from time-to-time in the school:
(a.)
to make a higher level of awareness of the
international nature of the aerospace endeavor part of every student’s
education.
(b.)
to make experiences with international
aerospace matters available to those students desiring them, through — for
example — Memoranda of Understanding with overseas universities.
MOU’s with at least
3 leading overseas universities shall be active, with an average, over several
years, of 5 students continuously exchanged between our program and theirs.
(7.)
Hands-on, undergraduate research experiences (URE’s) shall be a part of the degree programs of an
increasing number of aerospace students.
Appropriate incentives should be devised and offered to both students
and faculty willing and able to conduct and supervise these activities,
respectively.
Twenty-five percent of the School’s
undergraduate degree candidates should have been involved in URE’s at some time during their undergraduate years.
B.
Creating a learning and working environment attractive
to all who can profit from studying with us; one that eases transition to
college life for entrants and facilitates continuing life-long learning for
professionals.
(1.)
The School will improve processes for providing
academic advising, using information technology, to both increase the
efficiency of the process and to relieve faculty members of the burden of the
routine aspects. The system will allow
productive course/student matching to enable better scheduling of course
sections.
An interactive, web-based system will be
established to allow AE students to do their own preliminary course scheduling,
so that their faculty advisors can focus on career guidance and on those other
matters where special interaction is needed.
(2.)
The Aerospace Digital Library will be enhanced
and expanded to encourage and enable cross-disciplinary learning, for both
students and faculty; vertical and horizontal subject content integration; and
distance learning, incorporating realistic examples and problems and fast
access to data and knowledge bases.
The present number of direct links to
courses across the GT campus will double to 120, and expand further, to guide
learners to the best knowledge available worldwide.
(3.)
The School will develop its capabilities in the
area of distance learning, concentrating on presenting new material — always
recently distilled from research — suitable for masters level offerings.
At least three distance learning programs
will be active, allowing continuing education students to earn MS degrees and
certificate program diplomas, off site, each program with an individual
sub-disciplinary specialty.
(4.)
Information technology advances will be
exploited in the delivery of engineering educational content in both
experimental laboratory courses and in computer labs.
I.T. techniques will be available to allow
students self-paced, subject enrichment activity in
the Fluid Mechanics, Instrumentation/Electronics and Structures instructional labs
and the engineering graphics course.
(5.)
School activities will be devised to encourage
an environment typical of a “community of scholars”.
“Physics for poets” type seminars, with
cross-disciplinary speakers from the various Tech campus Schools and Centers,
will be conducted for the benefit of AE faculty, staff and students on ethics,
the environment and economics; and for faculty and students on advances in
modern physics, math, biology, and chemistry; manufacturing, logistics and
transportation, for example.
C.
Building a School whose physical environment —
facilities, equipment, offices, classrooms and laboratories — and quality of
essential services encourage the accomplishment of all of our goals and make
for a pleasant and personally rewarding workplace.
(1.) The faculty consensus to integrate
computerized material into the curriculum requires School computer facilities
which are continuously at a level commensurate with what our students are
likely to encounter as employees on their initial jobs. This requires both expert maintenance and
periodic up-grading.
Provide a state-of-the-art-equipped
computer lab with at least 10 well maintained workstations for undergraduate
use.
(2). Upgrade all faculty offices to provide at
least 200 square feet of usable floor area.
Improve the locations of faculty members active in the same
sub-discipline so that office and lab juxtaposition will increase efficiency
and the level of interactions. Provide
suitable desk space for all graduate students in the School.
(3.) Capitalize
on the talents of existing staff members, recognizing that the “information age”
has reduced the number and/or extent of many traditional secretarial tasks,
freeing some staff members to assume new duties.
Provide training for one administrative secretarial
person serving each faculty group, so that they can assist in preparing
proposal budgets (overhead rates, fringes, tuition charges, etc.). Ensure the knowledgability
of at least one staff member in the AE Academic Office as regards degree
requirements, course sequences, etc. so as to be a supplementary reference for
students’ academic advising (See also Item B).
D.
Making the activities of our School and the way
we conduct them such that colleagues from other universities and our
counterparts in industry and government laboratories will routinely come to
interact with us, to discuss the aerospace field’s opportunities, problems,
methods, curricula and research.
(1.) Continue to build closer and more active research
relationships with aerospace and related industries, maintain a better balance
among all the government agencies which are sources of aerospace
research funding. (See also Item A (3.))
Quantitative
Goals
Raise the per
faculty external research expenditure per calendar year from the present
average of approximately $200,000 to $300,000.
(2.) Continue to expand graduate student
internship programs in collaboration with industry and government research lab
partners. (See also Item A)
Quantitative
Goals
Each of the School’s six sub-disciplinary
groups should have at least four graduate internships continuously active,
together with the same number of faculty member-industry/government practitioner
relationships required for productive research on the part of the intern.
E.
Performing our chosen instructional, research
and service tasks so as to strengthen Georgia Tech, both by our contributions
as an individual school and through our support of and collaboration with other
components of the Georgia Tech family.
(1.) Develop joint MS programs with other Schools
at Georgia Tech, where demands for inter-disciplinary specialties are either not
offered by other universities or where the quality of such programs are well
below what can be offered here.
Quantitative
Goals
Although establishment of such joint
degrees will require, as a minimum, agreement of the faculties involved and
also means to avoid the problem of insurmountable prerequisites, two such
graduate programs should be established, each with at least five students
continuously enrolled from each school.
Possibilities include an MS in Management of Aerospace System
Developments (AE and C.O. Management), and an MS in Space Satellite Design (AE
and ECE).
(2.) Establish minor or certificate programs in
aerospace engineering, available to both undergraduate and graduate students in
non-aerospace engineering fields.
Quantitative
Goals
Three such programs should be active
which (a.) together account for five courses which would not otherwise be
offered and (b.) which contribute a 20 percent increase in each of ten courses
offered independent of the minor/certificate program. Possible minors include Computational Mechanics,
Combustion, and Integrated Product and Process Design at the graduate level,
and CFD and aeroacoustics at the undergraduate level.
F. Rising to relevant opportunities to
productively cross traditional disciplinary lines, and to eliminating barriers
to interdisciplinary cooperation in aerospace matters.
G. Acting, in all things, so as to recognize
that the ethnic, racial and gender distribution of our national workplace is
changing, and that a faculty, staff and student body whose constituents reflect
this diversity will better prepare graduates to take their places in its midst.
(1.) This requires being proactive in recruiting
at all levels, in the choice of visiting lecturers, seminar speakers, etc.