 
I'm Alejandra Uranga, research
engineer at MIT.
And I am Mark Drela, a professor
at MIT, and we'll be
giving the 16.110x Flight
Vehicle Aerodynamics course.
This is based on a course which
has been taught at the
MIT Department of
Aeronautics and
Astronautics for some time.
It's targeted primarily towards
first year graduate
students, however, advanced
undergraduates have taken the
course as well.
 
The online version will also
target commercial engineers
who wish to brush up on
their aeronautics
expertise and knowledge.
 
This is not a course in
handbook aerodynamics.
It assumes that you already have
some knowledge of basic
aerodynamics, and if you're
comfortable talking about Mach
number, Reynolds number,
then this course is
probably for you.
What we will give you is the
tools you'll need to think
about aerodynamic problems
in a sound way.
And we hope to give you an
intuitive feel for aerodynamic
flows and how they behave
in real applications.
The focus is on aerodynamic
modeling.
The modeling concepts,
the methods, and the
mathematical tools.
What you will gain will be the
ability to better understand
computational and experimental
results, and also rational
means to estimate lift, drag,
and aerodynamic interference.
You'll also gain an
understanding of how boundary
layers limits aerodynamic
performance, in general.
We will cover many topics in
this course, including
concepts related to potential
flows, effects of boundary
layers on potential flows,
force analysis, drag
breakdown, and related
concepts.
And we also delve into
compressible flows, including
transonic and supersonic flows,
and we'll also cover
unsteady flows.
Along the way we'll discuss some
techniques used in wind
tunnel testing.
Finally, we'll discuss
aerodynamic models used in
flight dynamics.
And in fact this course will
serve as a good introduction
to flight dynamics if
you've never been
exposed to that before.
So hopefully you now have some
idea about what this
course is all about.
And we hope you'll join us.
 
