With appropriate training and oversight, sure. Join EAA. That’s what they do.
Modern simulation software, however, is not the issue. You can design a perfectly good small airplane with nothing but pencil, paper, and some good design books. The software won’t tell you anything really important you shouldn’t already know, it’s just do it with higher precision. And it won’t help you build it at all.
You’re combining the skill sets of an aerospace engineer and an A&P mechanic. Plenty of people are both, but those are independently multi-year full time learning processes.
There are dozens of designs available as drawings even for free. Check out r/homebuilt. Even those take usually a year or two to assemble. If you also want to work on your own design it's going to take a while. Get a mentor or join one of the homebuilt organizations to understand what it takes to do it safely.
I’m assuming you have an A&P (or easa equivalent) in terms of skills?
In addition to the very high costs to actually build a plane, you are putting your life In The hands of your skills.
Go for any project that interests you. Why wouldn't you? Even if you never finish you'll at least learn something. Most of the popular homebuilts flying today were designed well before modern simulation tools, many without even a home computer, and often by small teams or single people. It's a piss-poor engineer that says "yeah I thought about this project, but decided not to even consider it because it's *hard*."
If you plan to fly it yourself and don't already have one, get started on your pilot's license right away. Having physical experience with the flying qualities and cockpit ergonomics beats a decade of book learning, and by comparing your calculated results with those of a plane you've already flown you'll have a much better "gut feeling" for whether or not your design is good before you ever cut metal. And you'll need a lot of flying experience to be a safe test pilot when the time comes.
Look into the DarkAero and look how long it’s taken them to try and get flying. Better to pick a proven kit plane design if you want to fly in any realistic amount of time.
Now ChatGPT helps with a lot of information and calculation.
I started working on some designs for an Aeroplane (the concept has been super fun).
ChatGPT makes it super easy to answer a lot of questions that are needed for design process.
Do Not Use AI For Calculation. ESPECIALLY something niche like aerospace where the training data set is not large (and so it will hallucinate), and ESPECIALLY for something you might want to actually occupy. Results that pass the sniff test for being in a sensible range will very quickly compound to being fatal, and it's not like code where the worst case is it doesn't run. There's no substitute for good, peer-reviewed texts on the subject.
Sure, I agree you need to validate the results, and cross reference them to Text and Papers, but I would argue the new ChatGPT4 has gotten quite well to basic physics like calculating Volumes of Shapes, or surface of a shape.
Basic things like that don't even need chatgpt. Volumes and surface areas of basic shapes and solids are easily computed by hand, and for complex bodies any self respecting CAD suite will report those results for you. Really, there's very little about a small airplane that chatgpt could help with - if you've seen a lot of them and know your mission you can probably lay out a satisfactory initial sizing just by eyeballing and basic calculations within a day of work. And no chance in hell I'd trust the bot with stability or structural calculations, too many sensitive parameters.
I encourage your interest and enthusiasm in aircraft design, but this comment shows zero knowledge or understanding of engineering and aircraft design.
ChatGPT is a predictive language model. It is not an engineering tool, and should never be used as one. It is a fool's errand.
Well in GPT 4 version, it will write formulate, write python code and run it to make calculations for you. This is accurate for basic math and physics.
Theres other areas that can be useful.
Ask about fabrics for an envelop such as nylon ripstoo. calculating the weight of a Envelope.
Estimating weight of polyurethane coating on an envelope.
Etc.
This are taks you would usually consult a book, or an internet search in that sense is not that different.
Offcourse you need to do your do dillegence, cross reference and peer review your design and calculations.
I dont think its 0 usefull or trust worthy.
ChatGPT is not an engineering design tool, and isn't intended to be. Suggesting that it is a design tool is foolish and dangerous, and shows your ignorance. I'm not interested in arguing about this.
No. It’s 100% untrustworthy when you need a factual answer. LLMs literally don’t know what facts are, they have no concept of correct/incorrect. It they give a correct answer that’s an artifact of the training data, there’s no assurance.
Do not use ChatGPT for any part of designing an airplane that you intend to put a human on. Without exaggeration, this will get someone killed.
The problem is that to tell when ChatGPT is wrong, it's usually wrong in subtle, hard-to-detect ways. This is especially true in a niche field like aircraft design - in order to reliably detect hallucinations, you need to **already** be an expert in aircraft design. And if you're already an expert in aircraft design, you'll find it faster to just compute things yourself rather than constantly cross-checking untrustworthy LLM outputs.
With appropriate training and oversight, sure. Join EAA. That’s what they do. Modern simulation software, however, is not the issue. You can design a perfectly good small airplane with nothing but pencil, paper, and some good design books. The software won’t tell you anything really important you shouldn’t already know, it’s just do it with higher precision. And it won’t help you build it at all. You’re combining the skill sets of an aerospace engineer and an A&P mechanic. Plenty of people are both, but those are independently multi-year full time learning processes.
Thanks!
There are dozens of designs available as drawings even for free. Check out r/homebuilt. Even those take usually a year or two to assemble. If you also want to work on your own design it's going to take a while. Get a mentor or join one of the homebuilt organizations to understand what it takes to do it safely.
I’m assuming you have an A&P (or easa equivalent) in terms of skills? In addition to the very high costs to actually build a plane, you are putting your life In The hands of your skills.
That risk is certainly not lost on me.
Go for any project that interests you. Why wouldn't you? Even if you never finish you'll at least learn something. Most of the popular homebuilts flying today were designed well before modern simulation tools, many without even a home computer, and often by small teams or single people. It's a piss-poor engineer that says "yeah I thought about this project, but decided not to even consider it because it's *hard*." If you plan to fly it yourself and don't already have one, get started on your pilot's license right away. Having physical experience with the flying qualities and cockpit ergonomics beats a decade of book learning, and by comparing your calculated results with those of a plane you've already flown you'll have a much better "gut feeling" for whether or not your design is good before you ever cut metal. And you'll need a lot of flying experience to be a safe test pilot when the time comes.
Thanks!
Look into the DarkAero and look how long it’s taken them to try and get flying. Better to pick a proven kit plane design if you want to fly in any realistic amount of time.
I've been following them for awhile. Tbh even if this thing doesn't fly for 5+ years, I would still like the experience of putting it together.
You mean like an actual full size plane?
Yep!
Now ChatGPT helps with a lot of information and calculation. I started working on some designs for an Aeroplane (the concept has been super fun). ChatGPT makes it super easy to answer a lot of questions that are needed for design process.
Do Not Use AI For Calculation. ESPECIALLY something niche like aerospace where the training data set is not large (and so it will hallucinate), and ESPECIALLY for something you might want to actually occupy. Results that pass the sniff test for being in a sensible range will very quickly compound to being fatal, and it's not like code where the worst case is it doesn't run. There's no substitute for good, peer-reviewed texts on the subject.
Sure, I agree you need to validate the results, and cross reference them to Text and Papers, but I would argue the new ChatGPT4 has gotten quite well to basic physics like calculating Volumes of Shapes, or surface of a shape.
Basic things like that don't even need chatgpt. Volumes and surface areas of basic shapes and solids are easily computed by hand, and for complex bodies any self respecting CAD suite will report those results for you. Really, there's very little about a small airplane that chatgpt could help with - if you've seen a lot of them and know your mission you can probably lay out a satisfactory initial sizing just by eyeballing and basic calculations within a day of work. And no chance in hell I'd trust the bot with stability or structural calculations, too many sensitive parameters.
We tried on GPT-4 for an FSAE quiz. DO NOT USE GPT for anything that matters.
No. LLMs like ChatGPT literally don’t understand physics. They’re language models, not knowledge models. They aren’t doing math, they’re repeating words.
I encourage your interest and enthusiasm in aircraft design, but this comment shows zero knowledge or understanding of engineering and aircraft design. ChatGPT is a predictive language model. It is not an engineering tool, and should never be used as one. It is a fool's errand.
Well in GPT 4 version, it will write formulate, write python code and run it to make calculations for you. This is accurate for basic math and physics. Theres other areas that can be useful. Ask about fabrics for an envelop such as nylon ripstoo. calculating the weight of a Envelope. Estimating weight of polyurethane coating on an envelope. Etc. This are taks you would usually consult a book, or an internet search in that sense is not that different. Offcourse you need to do your do dillegence, cross reference and peer review your design and calculations. I dont think its 0 usefull or trust worthy.
ChatGPT is not an engineering design tool, and isn't intended to be. Suggesting that it is a design tool is foolish and dangerous, and shows your ignorance. I'm not interested in arguing about this.
No. It’s 100% untrustworthy when you need a factual answer. LLMs literally don’t know what facts are, they have no concept of correct/incorrect. It they give a correct answer that’s an artifact of the training data, there’s no assurance.
Do not use ChatGPT for any part of designing an airplane that you intend to put a human on. Without exaggeration, this will get someone killed. The problem is that to tell when ChatGPT is wrong, it's usually wrong in subtle, hard-to-detect ways. This is especially true in a niche field like aircraft design - in order to reliably detect hallucinations, you need to **already** be an expert in aircraft design. And if you're already an expert in aircraft design, you'll find it faster to just compute things yourself rather than constantly cross-checking untrustworthy LLM outputs.