Exposure to Modern Technologies

Flight test engineering is a vast field connecting many different disciplines, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the important tasks of the flight test engineer and test pilot is the ability to communicate with the discipline engineers of the individual fields and be able to understand and relate to the details of their work.

Modern advances in technology have greatly increased the spectrum of involved disciplines. Full vehicle autonomy, for instance, involves novel aspects such as computer vision and deep learning. Fields which until recently seemed very far away from flight test engineering are suddenly at the forefront of development for many UAV companies. Automatic flight control systems (AFCS) are everywhere, including in small drones. Powered-lift, once exotic, sees also much more prevalence, particularly in eVTOL aircraft.

In Academic Flight’s Applied Flight Test Engineering Course Series you will be exposed to some of these technologies. You will learn the basics of computer vision and machine learning in our introductory Python programming course to give you a taste of these fields, to get you started, and to enable you to pursue them further in self-study to whichever extent you desire. And you will get experience writing and tuning an AFCS for an aircraft explicitly (though not in a DO-178C compliant way). This will expose you to additional important concepts such as Kalman filters and sensor fusion—algorithms which have been around for a while, but which are in more use than ever.