Aerospace Design Tactics to create Light yet Effective Machinery

Antifragility is a concept where an entity actually gains from suffering an adverse event. As an example, consider the mythological beast, the Hydra, who is able to grow back two heads when one gets chopped off. Applying antifragile techniques to aircraft design brings the potential for safer airplanes with the improved ability to react to catastrophic events when they occur.

Let’s take a closer look at these engineering innovations aimed at improving passenger safety.

Supporting an Iterative Design Process

The iterative nature of the aircraft engineering design process reflects antifragility concepts when it comes to terms like “fail-safe” and “damage tolerant.” As engineers work their way through testing aircraft designs, the parts of a design that work are retained, while failures are removed. This iterative process is known as stochastic tinkering.

Testing remains a vital aspect of the stochastic tinkering used in aerospace engineering. The worse case scenarios must be tested and retested, while engineers document the in-stress performance of components that must not fail compared against those other components which can fail due to the redundancies that were part of the aircraft’s initial design.

Visual Inspections still Important in the Aircraft Industry

Even when leveraging design techniques like antifragility and stochastic tinkering, certain airplane components can incur a certain level of structural failure while still maintaining flight safety and security. In these situations, it is important that any critical damage is visible to airplane inspectors performing a pre-flight check up.

Additionally, when performing load testing, it is vital to increase the load factors to account for the potential of catastrophic events — both known and unknown. Still, it is up to the aerospace engineer to analyze the cause of any catastrophe and feed what they learned back into that same design and testing process. Safe flight using antifragile aircraft is the ultimate goal of this engineering discipline.

If you are inspired to improve your aerospace engineering career, talk to The Talley Group. As one of the top engineering staffing agencies in Washington, they are a great source of Seattle aerospace engineering jobs. Make it a point to talk with The Talley Group today!