Aerospace Engineering Education During the First Century of Flight (Library of Flight Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)Anniversaries always spark historical publications celebrating whatever anniversary that is in vogue. The centennial of the first flight of the Wright brothers in December 2003 was no exception. This book is one product of that commemoration. It is essentially a collection of papers about the history of aerospace engineering education in the United States, each written by a different author or set of authors, especially focused on institutional history of 69 separate institutions created to train engineers in the mechanics of flight.
The work is divided into six major parts. The first contains a general overview of the origins of aerospace engineering education. Part II focuses on the founding institutions in the field--MIT, the University of Detroit, the University of Michigan, and New York University. Part III explores the Guggenheim Foundation's efforts to further flight since the 1920s. Part IV, by far the largest section of the book, has individual chapters chronologically arranged about the major institutions of higher learning training aerospace engineers. In this section, there are capsule summaries of such stellar engineering schools as Caltech, Auburn University, and Purdue University, to name only a few. In Part V the authors review the role of the military service academies in training aerospace engineers. And to conclude the volume, Part VI contains succinct accounts of training programs evolved from corporations and other propriety institutions such as Boeing and Northrop.
This is a useful work of compilation for bringing together the summaries of these various institutions. There is very little commonality of ingredients from chapter to chapter, and no sense of a single theme or thesis, so anyone using it to build a picture of the discipline will have to be creative in the use of the information. Some articles are referenced, others not. Some contain curricula over time, some do not. None ask overarching historical questions about the development of the aerospace engineering discipline. There is a discernable focus on individuals and heroic research and teaching. There are basic components of any work of non-fiction that are missing, such as an index.
In the end "Aerospace Engineering Education During the First Century of Flight" is very much a history written by and for aerospace engineers. For all its virtues, and there are some, the overview offered here is replete with the linear process of aerospace "progress" to the very great exclusion of any social or cultural factors that might have influenced the evolution of the discipline. There is little of the obscurity of choices about research and training that might have enriched this story. We await a comprehensive and innovative history of this important subdiscipline in engineering education. There is yet to be written for aerospace engineers such a work as C.R. Day's "Education for the Industrial World: The Ecole d'Arts et Mtiers and the Rise of French Industrial Engineering" (MIT Press, 1987), which provides an outstanding case study in the evolution of technological consciousness, or even John Hubbel Weiss's "The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education" (MIT Press, 1982). Even so, this is a moderately useful book.

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On 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC, the Wright brothers succeeded in achieving controlled flight in a heavier-than-air machine. This feat was accomplished by them only after meticulous experiments and a study of the work of others before them like Sir George Cayley, Otto Lilienthal, and Samuel Langley. The first evidence of the academic community becoming interested in human flight is found in 1883 when Professor J. J. Montgomery of Santa Clara College conducted a series of glider tests. Seven years later, in 1890, Octave Chanute presented a number of lectures to students of Sibley College, Cornell University entitled "Aerial Navigation." This book is a collection of papers solicited from U. S. universities or institutions with a history of programs in Aerospace/Aeronautical engineering. There are 69 institutions covered in the 71 chapters. This collection of papers represents an authoritative story of the development of educational programs in the nation that were devoted to human flight. Most of these programs are still in existence but there are a few papers covering the history of programs that are no longer in operation.A comprehensive treatment of the early beginnings of aerospace education are documented in Part I as well as the rapid expansion of educational programs relating to aeronautical engineering that took place in the 1940s. Part II is devoted to the four schools that were pioneers in establishing formal programs. Part III describes the activities of the Guggenheim Foundation that spurred much of the development of programs in aeronautical engineering. Part IV covers the 48 colleges and universities that were formally established in the mid-1930s to the present. The military institutions are grouped together in the Part V; and Part VI presents the histories of those programs that evolved from proprietary institutions.

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