<p>Are Aerospace engineers in a separate field of their own like Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering?</p>
<p>Or are Aerospace engineers a mixture of Mechanical and Electrical engineers who just call themselves Aerospace engineers?</p>
<p>I want to work hands on with commercial aircraft, but I heard true "Aerospace engineers" (the ones who get a degree in Aerospace) never really work on designing the aircraft itself. Only Mechanical and Electrical engineers design the systems and structures of an airplane. Is this true?</p>
<p>(Real question is: If I want to work hands on and design commercial aircraft, should I get an Electrical Engineering degree or an Aerospace Engineering degree?)</p>
<p>What I think many would tell you is Aerospace Engineers are a more specific aspect of Mechanical engineering.I know at my school, AE are required to take the following courses:</p>
<p>-A few of fluid mechanics course
-Thermodynamics
-Solid mechanics and structural analysis
-Dynamics and controls
-Programming and then use it a bit in other coursework
-Propulsion
-Circuit Analysis coursework
-Numerical methods
-Flight Mechanics
-Celestial Mechanics
-Various labs and projects to apply coursework
-We then have plenty of AE elective courses that dive into the following topics:
~Rocket Propulsion
~Applied aerodynamics and Advanced Flight Mechanics and control
~Electric Propulsion
~Heat Transfer fluid mechanics courses
~CFD courses
~Robotics and controls courses
~More advanced celestial mechanics courses and controls of objects in space
~Lots of courses on composite design and analysis
~Aeroelasticity
~etc…</p>
<p>Now, to my knowledge, most working aerospace engineers tend to get starting jobs doing structural analysis, aiding with optimizing the aircraft shape for aerodynamic, structural and other loads, dynamics & controls and systems engineering. I am sure there are a decent number of Aeros who end up just going into computer science too since many get really into that aspect and get really good at it. </p>
<p>However, in almost all cases, Aerospace engineers do their work via computers and don’t go actually help physically put products together. I don’t think Mechanical engineers often physically work on things either, but do more design work as well.</p>
<p>By the way, there are definitely some of the main requirements of Aero that Mechanical Engineering students have to do too, like Thermo, fluids and structures and maybe some others. I think Aerospace just may take less courses in one topic and more in another compared to a Mechanical for some of those areas. They do split apart in coursework by a bit though for the most part (at least at my school).</p>
<p>Your question isn’t specific enough. A commercial aircraft has many things that are designed for it. There is a lot of hardware design, component design, software design and then of course the aircraft’s geometry must be designed. Which one are you interested in?</p>
<p>Edit: I think you will find that PhD level researchers in all of these areas may actually have a bit of hands on work but you generally don’t find that being the case for someone with just a BS, from what I know. The only Aero company I know that puts the Aerospace Engineers to work via a computer and by their hands is like SpaceX (at least that’s what I have heard)</p>
<p>Well, I’m graduating this semester with a BS in Electrical Engineering and I’m getting a Masters through paid research. At our university, Aerospace is only offered as a Masters in Mechanical and their course requirements are probably a third of what you listed.</p>
<p>Students must choose three courses from the following list of courses:</p>
<pre><code>Advanced Fluid Mechanics I
Advanced Fluid Mechanics II
Computational Fluid Dynamics
Conduction Heat Transfer
Convective Heat Transfer
Advanced Dynamics
Energy and Variational Methods in Applied Mechanics I
</code></pre>
<p>In addition students must select at least two courses selected from the following list</p>
<pre><code>Finite Element Applications in Mechanical Engineering
Advanced Thermodynamics
Transport Phenomena
Acoustics I
Acoustics II
Vibrations I
Vibrations II
Advanced Robotics
Introduction to Theory of Elasticity and Plasticity I
Application of High-Performance Computing Methods in Science and Engineering
</code></pre>
<p>Right now, I’m stuck on whether it is “preferred” to get a Masters in Electrical Engineering or this Masters in Aerospace Engineering to accomplish my dream job of working on aircraft.</p>
<p>Aerospace engineering, scientifically, is really a subset of mechanical engineering. The science on which the two are based is the same but the examples have changed. Aerospace engineers take a nearly identical set of core classes to what mechanical engineers do, but each class is specifically taught with aerospace applications in mind, so things like fluids classes focus less on pipe flows and more on external flows over bodies, for example. Some schools even have their aerospace programs organized within their mechanical programs. Others have them separate.</p>
<p>As for who works on planes, it is quite literally every major type of engineer that has some part in the design and construction of airplanes, most notably mechanical, aerospace, electrical, materials science and computer science. Which best suits you depends on the particular subsystems of the plane you are interested in working with. Mechanical and aerospace engineers have a lot of overlap with the systems they work on. The rest of them should be pretty straightforward.</p>
<p>Finally, I am not quite sure what you are looking to do. You say you want to “work hands on” as well as “design commercial airplanes”, but these two are often mutually exclusive. It wouldn’t make much sense for one engineer to do both. You generally have groups of engineers designing the plane and other groups working on the manufacturing side of things without many who do both. Furthermore, there aren’t many who are doing “hands on” work such as that found on the plant floor who have master’s degrees. Most of the people I know or know of who do hands on work with a master’s degree are doing it on the research side of things, so they still aren’t generally building the planes themselves, but things like wind tunnel models and instrumentation for them.</p>
<p>In other words, think a bit more about what it is that you actually want. That will help decide the path you should take.</p>
<p>Well the requirements for a masters will be less than what I specified, which is a bachelors. However, I would suspect for a lot of those courses you listed, you would need to take some preliminary classes to get you ready for those if you are graduating with a BS in EE, which is time you may not want to waste just to get a MS in AE.</p>
<p>The reasoning this may not be worth it is because of what boneh3ad and I have been getting at, which is aircraft require the efforts of many types of engineering. EE is a big part of it too, so you could surely work on aircraft for like Boeing or someone else with a MS in EE instead of a MS in AE. If I were you, I would probably go the MS EE route and just do well in the program because then you could surely get a job with an aviation company and not risk having to take preliminary courses just to take the MS AE requirements.</p>
<p>Okay, thanks guys. I will take your advice and get the Masters in Electrical Engineering.</p>
<p>By “hands on”, I meant I wanted to see the aircraft and its parts as it was being built or tested, rather than do design work in a cubicle farm and never see an aircraft my entire career. I didn’t mean grab a wrench and start bolting the actual plane together. Lol. Sorry for the confusion, but like I said, thanks for the help!</p>
<p>Yeah, I wonder if many engineers really get to go see an aircraft as it gets built in the bigger companies. Glad to help man, good luck for sure! Just figure out what specific focus area in EE will give you the best opportunities in the aviation companies! From what I know, it is usually communication aspects but I don’t know for sure!</p>