Data Science and Computing with Python for Pilots and Flight Test Engineers

This course provides an introduction to data science with Python for professional pilots, flight instructors creating innovative teaching materials, and particularly for test pilots and flight test engineers involved in flight tests. In addition, many engineers and other professionals also in non-technical fields outside of aviation may find this course useful.

Among our younger audience, we particularly encourage avid, ambitious high school students take this course, as it will help them develop their analytic thinking and skills, improve their grades in their high school projects, and enable them to prepare better ahead of time for the attendance of top universities worldwide.

A Most Important Skill Set

This course will teach you one of the most universally applicable, fundamental skill sets a modern professional in any field should strive to possess in the 21st century. It is the ability to:

• Read data into a computer from a file, with the intent of further processing.
• Preprocess the data, i.e. prepare it for analysis, e.g. by removing obvious errors, selecting the part of the whole dataset which you want to use, dealing with incomplete data and gaps, etc.
• Analyze the data with some basic statistical methods, like histograms or fitting a curve through some data points with measurement error bars.
• Visualize the data, by creating visually appealing graphical representations of it for public presentations.
• Be able to draw conclusions from the data by inspecting these visualizations.
• Write a computer program (i.e. provide the computer with a series of instructions in textual form, which a computer then executes) to accomplish the above tasks in an arbitrarily flexible way as needed, such that one can do anything one wants, and is not limited by the finite set of features of the software one uses.

We believe in the universal importance of this skill set so much, that we offer many of the lessons in this online course openly accessible for free, such that everyone – no matter what their academic, economic, and social background is or where they are located in the world – can seize this opportunity to educate themselves and improve their data handling and computer skills in support of their own profession.

Especially by including the last bullet point above, this course is designed to give you far more capability and flexibility in your data analysis and visualization, than you would have, if you used some spreadsheet-based program with a graphical user interface (GUI), where you can just press some buttons with your mouse, such as Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel is a very useful program with some great features. But you are limited to using whatever features its software developers included in Excel. If something has not implemented, you do not have it, period, and there is nothing you can do about it (except perhaps to find some different software, which may also not have exactly what you want). In contrast, in this course, you will learn how to implement whatever you need yourself.

Whom this Course is for?

In discussing, who may benefit greatly from this course, let us start with our youngest target audience – because what applies to them actually applies to all others as well.

High School Students

If you are in high school (or perhaps even still in middle school, but very avid and eager), why should this course appeal to you? Because it will help you do your school work better and get better grades, maybe even with less time spent. Imagine you have a science project, which you need to do for a science fair. This project will likely culminate in some sort of poster. This poster needs to explain to people, what you have done. It will therefore likely contain some plots of data in some visually appealing form.

If you do not know, how to make these plots, you will get stuck and will need help. You will not only get stuck at the very end, making the plots for the final poster. You will get stuck at the very beginning of the project (and will likely get frustrated early on). Why? Because if you do not know how to make the final plot, you probably also do not know how to visualize, what you want to plot in the first place, to make a strong point on your poster. And if you do not know, what your final plots should look like, you will not know, what kind of data to collect beforehand. If you do not know, what kind of data to collect, you will not know what to measure and what kind of apparatus or experiment to set up at the beginning of the project. Thus, from the beginning, you will just sit there helplessly, will not know even how to start, and you will feel discouraged. This discouragement will result in you not putting in enough effort, which will lead to a mediocre grade, even after you receive massive help. This will lead to you being perceived as not very smart and intellectually mature, which in conjunction with your mediocre grades will lead to you not getting into a top university after high school, such as MIT or Princeton (just to give a couple of examples).

We do not want to scare you with the above paragraph. The point we want to make is that, if you just put in some time to learn the above fundamental skill set, all of this will instantly change. It is still going to be you, with your same body and brain. But you will suddenly be capable. Things you never thought you would be good at (or things you though you are still too young for), will suddenly come to you with ease. You will be doing things easily that kids five years older still struggle with. Why? To understand this, let us return back to the above example of you having to do some science project for some fair.

Indeed, if you do know how to make a plot with a computer and how to visualize some data, your project will go very differently. Knowing how to make plots and what kind of plots exist, you will have a general idea from the start, how you will want to present the data and your insights to your audience on your poster. You will ask yourself questions like which quantities will you want to plot along the axes of your plots to get some meaningful presentation in support of your statement in the poster (the thing you want to show). Knowing what to plot on the axes will tell you, what kind of quantities you will need to measure in your experiment. This will now lead you to having a decent idea of what your experiment or apparatus should look like and how you have to get started. You may still need a little bit of help here and there with execution. For instance, your first attempt at collecting data will not turn out quite the way you have imagined. Maybe there is too much noise in the measurement and/or the experimental setup needs some improvements. But you will – on your own and from the very beginning – have an overarching idea of the project and its execution and you will be able to roughly visualize, what it ought to look like from the beginning to the end. This will immensely help you to execute the project, make you far more independent as a student, and you will look intellectually far more mature – to your teachers and also to yourself, which will boost your confidence in your abilities. And all of this, because you have learned in this course, how to present (and perhaps also analyze) some data, and how to get a computer to do for you, what you want and need.

College Students and Professionals in Non-Technical Fields

Exactly the same arguments apply to any college student and professional in non-technical fields. Say, for the sake of the argument, that you study business. You need to create a presentation to convince other people of your ideas. This presentation will contain some data plots to support your ideas and put them on a solid footing, to make your arguments more convincing. Well, you need to know how to create these data plots. And the results will be far better if you know how to make them yourself, than if you have to ask one of your colleagues for help (this is in part, because you may have to create several such plots to arrive at what you want, and experiment a bit).

In addition, for any work that you will do, these plots are of course not only useful to convince your coworkers and customers, but they also help you deduce insight from the data yourself in the first place, which will give you superior ability to decide what to do.

Established Professionals in Technical Fields

Perhaps you already are an engineer or scientist with many years of work experience. But for some reason, you need to learn Python and how to do some data analysis with it. This can occur, for instance, if you switch jobs or join a new team, and this team is using Python and the Jupyter environment. You already know the statistics for data analysis, and you know how to program in a different programming language. But you want to learn how to do it with Python, because Python is so convenient and so many modules with all kinds of functionality exist for it.

Then this course is also for you. In fact, it will be a bit easier to work through it than for the others, and you may even be able to skim through some of the basics. You advantage will come in that we cannot cover all of computer programming and data science comprehensively in this course. We will do only as much computer programming as is needed to achieve are data science objectives (but enough for everyone to learn how to write clean code, which will make it easy to collaborate with others). As for the statistics, having prior background is helpful (though not required). We cannot cover all of statistics theory here and primarily just use some of it. Course participants with no prior knowledge of statistics can still follow easily, but they are encourage to read up on the associated statistics theory if they want to develop a deeper understanding, with the links that we provide in the lessons.

Pilots, Flight Instructors, Test Pilots, and Flight Test Engineers

As an airline pilot interested in the operational and business aspects of your airline you may have a need to present some data to make a point, when you speak with management. Or you are a pilot, who would like to start their own charter operation or flight school.

On the more engineering oriented end, perhaps you are a test pilot or flight test engineer, who is about to attend the professional course at an internationally recognized test pilot school. Surprisingly many such students are more familiar just with Microsoft Excel. When considering Python for this purpose, you should also consider MATLAB as a possible alternative, which is wildly used as well (however, it is not free, although a free version called Octave exists). The concepts are quite similar though.

Academic Flight Students

Last but not least, this course also covers (more than) the programming and data science prerequisites required for some of our more advanced technical courses at Academic Flight LLC. Working through this course on your own beforehand will put you in a strong position to be able to succeed even in our more challenging academic courses.