Top 10 Resources for Aerospace Engineers
5 must-have books & 5 indispensable links
OK, so you’ve finished your aerospace engineering course. You’ve got the job. And now you’re ensconced in a lackluster cubicle, a musty pre-war office or a poorly air-conditioned portable adjacent an airstrip. You’re busily modelling in CAD, doing strength & stiffness calcs, figuring out stability derivatives, selecting propellers, writing test plans and appreciating the finer points of Dilbert.
So, out of all of the dozens of painfully expensive textbooks that you were forced to buy at university, which ones do you actually need to survive and thrive as a practicing aerospace engineer?
Below is a shortlist of suggestions that I offer to you, complete with warts and all commentary. This list is completely un-coerced, un-sponsored and un-censored. It’s simply a list of books and links that I’ve personally found have stood the test of time over nearly two decades in the aerospace industry.
I’ve tried to keep these resources generic but I admit there’s a bit of a design and structures bias in there. Is there anything crucial that’s missing? Let us know in the comments!
Top 5 Books
1. AIAA Aerospace Design Engineers Guide
Top of the list by a fair margin, this classic guidebook is now in its sixth edition. And like a fine wine, it gets better with age. This book is a must-have, the sort of reference that gets better the further you progress in your career. The more you learn about different disciplines, the more valuable you realize this compilation is. These days it’s my starting point on just about any clean-sheet problem. (and I highly recommend the app too!)
There’s a lifetime of graybeard wisdom here, condensed into a tight, well-edited package. Standard atmosphere: check. Wing geometrical nomenclature: check. Section properties: check. GD&T: check. Pins, fits, bushings: check. Component drag buildup: check. Galvanic series: check. Fundamentals of stealth design: check. You get the picture.
I’ve heard it said “If you’re going on secondment and have to choose between taking this book and taking your diary, take this book.” I agree.
2. Roark’s Formulas for Stress and Strain
Yes, we all know remember how to draw Bending Moment Diagrams from scratch (don’t we?). But let’s be realistic here. This is the real world, and time is money. Why re-invent the wheel?
Roark’s textbook is a one-stop structural analysis shop, with easy-to-use parametric formulas for beams, plates, shells, frames and more. Nearly every conceivable load case is there, with multiple point and distributed load combinations represented with clear diagrams and easy-to-use-formulas.
Granted, you will need to verify these results with more detailed analysis, FEA or tests that are specific to your unique application. But for initial sizing it’s invaluable. Find your load case, plug in your numbers, and bang, you’ve got a reasonable analysis to get you started.
Perhaps you work for Boeing or Airbus or BAE. If so, move along. Selecting fasteners, connectors, tubes and material stock will be a breeze for you. Simply open your company’s approved standard parts catalog and pick what you need.
For everyone else working in a small or medium private company, the Aircraft Spruce Catalog is indispensable.
Crammed with 100,000+ aviation products, this fully illustrated catalog contains a wealth of details for fasteners, clips, latches, filters, pumps, bearings, kits, composites, batteries, avionics, electronics, training material and much, much more. Designers will discover parts they never knew existed, which will help them devise better designs.
There are other vendors out there, of course, but for a one-stop-shop that caters to the homebuilder market, experimental aircraft, general aviation, remotely piloted systems and more, the Spruce catalog is hard to beat. It’s available in hardcopy, PDF or CD format.
I don’t know how Michael Niu pulled this feat off. He basically pillaged huge chunks of the Lockheed Design Manual, company stress memos and elaborate cutaway drawings which must’ve taken draftsmen months to produce, and weaved them into a rich, comprehensive textbook. There is a wealth of old-school technical info here that’s impossible to readily find elsewhere. He’s also expanded upon Bruhn’s classic textbook by scrubbing out many of the errors and clarifying the diagrams.
If you’re a design engineer who visualizes as much as calculates, you’ll appreciate what Niu has done here. A cutaway drawing tells a thousand words, and this book is filled with them.
Some of this textbook is a little dated now; for example it pre-dates the 787/A350/A380/A400M, so composites and CAD/CAM have matured considerably. But if you want a solid starting point on questions like “how do I design an aircraft door?”, “how do I determine the optimal frame pitch for a narrow-body airliner?”, “which hat-section should I start with for stringer sizing?”, then this book will give you a huge head start.
5. The Standard Handbook for Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineers
Few of my colleagues have heard of this one, but this textbook earns its way onto the list purely due to its astonishing breadth and depth. It’s basically an entire aerospace engineering course packed into a single book.
In fact, if I had known about this book I probably wouldn’t have bothered taking notes in my subjects and just relied on it. It’s that comprehensive.
Major disciplines are covered in-depth; structures, dynamics, materials, certification, etc, etc. An added bonus is some hard-to-find parametric data and group weights for modern aircraft which are more up to date than Raymer or Roskam. These can be used for reliable aircraft sizing during the conceptual design phase.
The only drawback is its monstrous size, so it’s probably best to get this one as an ebook.
Top 5 Links
1. Everyspec
The number one link, bar none. Every standard that matters is here: MIL-STDs, MIL-HDBKs, MS Specs, AN Specs, ASTMs, FAA publications and a whole lot more. The standards are downloadable for free as PDFs, and all past revisions and amendment dates are there too. It’s magnificent. I admit it, if this site ever goes down, I’m doomed.
2. Matweb
Another very rich resource for materials data, Matweb goes well beyond your standard metallic allowables and presents a wealth of data on thermoplastics, thermosets, superalloys, nylon, and more. Be prudent when using the data; always check that it’s sensible and confirm using tests if required. But I generally trust Matweb, it’s my first port of call for data like hardness, thermal and processing properties which can be difficult to find elsewhere.
3. ESDU
As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. And ESDU are the gold standard when it comes to peer-reviewed, rigorous analysis methods & design best practices.
Let me put it this way: say you need to design a lug for a strut. You could spend an entire afternoon trawling through Bruhn, trying to sift out the hundreds of pages of errata, wondering if his factors and curves can be trusted (short answer: no, not without checking). Or you could just buy the relevant, peer-reviewed ESDU standard and move on.
Suppose you’re writing a manufacturing spec for your company, trying to disposition an expensive non-conforming composite part at an MRB, developing a standard repair scheme or figuring out what to write on a surface finish drawing note. Where can you find reputable, industry-standard guidelines to help you?
Fear not, the FAA has prepared the Aviation Maintenance Technican Handbook, a brilliant practical manual that provides practical guidelines on structural repairs, rigging, electronics, pneumatic systems and much more. It’s richly illustrated and non-mathematical in its presentation. And it’s all free, reference-able and in the public domain.
Other highlights from the FAA’s publications include the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, the Advanced Avionics Handbook and the Weight and Balance Handbook.
OK, OK, I cringe a bit at putting this link in. But if you’re like me, you’ll admit that sometimes, you make arithmetical errors. OK, maybe more than sometimes…
The previous generation of aero engineers got around this by relying on reverse-Polish calculators or unwieldy programs like Maple. But they have now effectively been made redundant by Wolfram Alpha. This tool continues to improve with time, and can be accessed via browser or app. You can quickly do a lot of basic stuff; trigonometry, kinematics, surface areas of complex shapes, solving equations. The last thing you want is to get these calcs wrong in the early stages of design, so why not let Wolfram Alpha do the number crunching for you?
Wolfram Alpha also offers an aerospace engineering module. I haven’t used it personally, but given that Boeing, Thales, BAE, NASA, Northrop Grumman & others have, I reckon it’d be worth a look.
Honorable mentions
Below are a few excellent additional resources that are a bit more discipline-specific, but definitely deserve a mention:
Aircraft Sizing: Raymer, Roskam, Anderson
Stress Analysis: Bruhn, Flabel, Niu (composites)
Dynamics and Stability: USAF DATCOM (also available digitally), Nelson
Aircraft Data: AW&ST Aerospace Source Book
Airfoil Selection: UIUC Airfoil Database
Propeller Design: UIUC Propeller Database
Electric Motor Design: eCalc
General: NASA Technical Reports Server, Engineer’s Edge
Career Advice: Advice for Rocket Scientists, Raymer’s Rules for Young Engineers, Roskam’s Lessons Learned in Aircraft Design
Have I missed anything? Add your favorite resources in the comments!
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