Overview

Imagine engineers without computers! It is true the great aeronautical discoveries were made without millions of transistors in pursuit of an optimal design. Heinkel used beer coasters to sketch out his famous airplanes. However, without digital computers solving the navigation equations, Neil Armstrong would not have set foot on the moon. It was in that decade, the 1960s, that I replaced my slide rule first by analog and then by digital computers. Certainly, I have no desire to return to the "good old days."

With the blessing of computers came also the curse to feed the beasts. They are insatiable, devouring innumerable lines of code. Who feeds them? Engineers do. Today, we design a big airplane like the Boeing 777 without a scrap of paper. Yes, we develop and use computer tools lavishly, but also try to keep our identity as visionaries of air and space travel.

In the following chapters I help you to model and simulate your visions. We presume that the design already exists and is defined by its subsystems, like aerodynamics, propulsion, guidance and control. You will learn how to formulate the dynamic behavior of your vehicle in a concise mathematical form and how to convert this model into computer code. You will write your own simulations in CADAC, a PC-based set of dynamic modeling tools. With its graphic charts you can promote your design among your peers.

We will use tensors to model vehicle dynamics, independent of coordinate systems. The simplest form of Cartesian...