Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

This first part of the course Introduction to Aerospace Engineering presents an overall picture of the aeronautics domain. This overview involves a number of different perspectives on the aerospace domain, and shows some basic principles of the most important concepts for flight. Then the basic aerodynamics are covered, followed by flight mechanics.

During the OCW Global 2013 conference Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I was awarded with the Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence in the category of best multimedia course.

  • Have an overview of the history of flight
  • Apply basic/constitutive principles of mechanics of fluids – a.o. Bernoulli.
  • Apply control volume approaches
  • Explain flow regimes (viscous/non-viscous; compressible/incompressible aerodynamics) and to estimate viscous and thermal effects
  • Compute lift/drag of simple configurations
  • Describe reference frames and derive general equations of motion for flight and orbital mechanics
  • Apply equations of motion to determine aircraft performance in steady gliding, horizontal and climbing flight
  • Derive aircraft performance diagram and flight envelope, in relation to aircraft morphology, lift-drag polar and engine performance
Creative Commons License
Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/introduction-aerospace-engineering/.
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