Much water has flown under the bridge since 2010 when I graduated from RMIT. Diploma in my hands, a farewell party left in the past, I was looking into the future, starting a new life, full of challenges. An engineering profession is not an easy one, but I was never searching for easy ways and never regretted the occupation I had chosen. Now looking back to my life I would change nothing.
I always had everything a successful engineer needs. Inquisitive by nature, from early childhood I tried to make things work more efficiently, continually examining them and inventing new unexpected ways of their usage. I always could think logically and was mathematically inclined, paid much attention to the slightest details, as a single mistake may spoil the whole engineering project and put in vain hours of a team’s hard work. It is very important to find your place in this world and I was lucky to do so. I must admit that I had three stars that lightened my career path and inspired me.
The first star was the star of Leonardo Da Vinci, a great Renaissance inventor that could consider himself an engineer, whose contribution to world science and bright personality impressed me much. He became my icon and inspiration, an ideal engineer so to say. Leonardo’s ideas were far ahead of his time, he was a great innovative thinker. It is a striking fact that his writings and sketches encourage experimentation even of the present-day engineers. Leonardo designed flying machines and instruments of war, worked at practical theories and concepts in engineering and mathematics. I think that I decided to devote my life to engineering watching bright pictures of Leonardo’s sketches in one of the encyclopedias for kids. Leonardo was the first to design a glider in the history of humanity and that glider, designed in the fifteenth century, has much in common with a glider of the twenty-first century. Remarkably, the scientists used one of his designs of a glider in their experiment a few years ago. They followed Leonardo’s instructions exactly and the materials used were similar to those of Vinci’s times. The experiment was even more successful than the well-known Wright brothers’ flight, the glide flew longer than their pilot did. The first concept of the helicopter with an aerodynamic screw belongs to Da Vinci and Leonardo was the first to mention the idea of the parachute. And what impressed me most was an incident from Leonardo’s youth which he considered to be a destiny sign. He was a baby when a hawk flew down and sat on his cradle. He could form a phobia of birds but instead of it, he saw a positive message in the incident, pointing to his destiny to achieve a flight. I recollected that myth at different periods of my life and always tried to form the right attitude to the events and destiny signs. By the way, much of Vinci’s study on aerodynamics is based on his study of bird flight. It is hard to believe but he managed to describe the sources of lift as well as pressure drag in the technical language of the early sixteenth century.
Another great engineer who became my inspiration was Gustave Eiffel, whose name bears a famous tower of Paris, the unprecedented 300 meters height and 7000 tons weight structure, the symbol of Paris. The birth of this masterpiece was not an easy one. The petition with 300 names expressed the protest to the “monstrous” Eiffel tower. People thought it could interfere with the bird’s flight and contradict the whole architecture of the city. But whatever difficult its birth was, at the present moment the tower is admired by millions of tourists from all over the world and is accepted by the French citizens completely. The fact is that Gustave Eiffel interested me much more for his experiments in aerodynamics, which is my specialization. His contributions to experimental aerodynamics are remarkable; some of his experimental techniques are still used nowadays. In 1909 Eiffel designed and built a wind tunnel within the shadow of his tower that was a new type of tunnel, which became the prototype of the classic type, named the Eiffel-type tunnel. There he conducted the first wind-tunnel tests, using the models of the complete airplanes, showing the correspondence between the test results and the actual flight. A year after the beginning of the operation Eiffel published his first data of the wind-tunnel experiments in the work The Resistance of the Air and Aviation, which remains a masterpiece of experimental aerodynamics. It was Eiffel who coined two new terms that are used every day in aerodynamics and that I used in my work. These are the terms “wind tunnel” and “polar diagram”, the latter now transformed into “drag polars”, but the use of the word polar is due to Eiffel. Eiffel first proved the principle that a net lift on a body in a flow is the integrated effect of the pressure distributions over its surface. His wind-tunnel tests became a heart and a soul in the twenty-first-century researches, I was lucky to read some of his works in the original and must admit that they are really of great scientific value and I felt proud using some of his methods more than a century after his death there was no another genius to make the same contribution to aerodynamics since then.
One more engineering project that motivated me was Dr. Marilyn Smith’s research, which is our contemporary and together with her colleagues and students was working at the aircraft design, trying to make airplanes and helicopters less susceptible to damage from fatigue. I came across her project in the last year of my study and it impressed me greatly. They were trying to integrate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications with the structural equations of motion.
Incorporating the structural and aerodynamic equations of motion and CFD in the same computer code, she investigated the interaction between structure and fluid flow. Dr. Marilyn Smith was going to design a new type of aircraft, to incorporate acoustics into her research and to try to make the planes take-offs and landings more palatable to the ears of those who are on the ground. She made her biggest contribution to the study of aeroelasticity. These researches interested me greatly and I learned a lot about the results of their experiments, which were useful for me for my professional growth.
I started my career at Northrop Grumman Corporation, Pico Rivera in the position of an engineer, few years later it was the position of the leading engineer at the same company. That was my first experience, my responsibilities included CFD analyses, drag optimization, and stability estimation. I conducted several wind tunnel testings and made calculations for trade studies. At that time conducting the wind tunnel tests of advanced aerodynamic configurations I often remembered one of my icons, Eiffel, as it was he who contributed so much to the methodology of such tests and invented the word combination wind tunnel itself. And it was not that easy at his times as the science and technologies were not on that high level as they are at the moment, but still, he was single-minded and persevering. And I tried to do my best to make at least a small contribution to the researches connected with my profession, to which I devoted the whole of my life. The next place I am working at is Lockheed Martin Corporation, Palmdale, where I am in the position of an aeronautical engineer at the present moment. Here I am responsible for vehicle aerodynamic design and direct trade studies, the analysis of the wind tunnel testings, choice of the test program, and its updating due to the latest researches data. My functions are to analyze the aerodynamic data before the flight, to monitor the test data during the flight, and to analyze the simulation after the flight to verify some concrete aerodynamic models. I like the things I do very much, my everyday work is full of calculations, schemes and may seem monotonous and boring but I get satisfaction from what I am doing.
The engineer’s everyday reality is creating the artifacts of modern life and they can be found anywhere you look. Surely such brilliant scientists as Da Vinci, Eiffel are born once in several centuries, but such prominent researchers as Dr. Marilyn Smith are making their contribution into the general data storage today. Perhaps their work will be valued only by the next generations. Machines can replace a lot of other workers, but there are no such schemes and such mechanisms which could think logically and creatively at the same time, which could make our everyday life easier and bring comfort to our homes and making efforts to master the universe at the same time. The task of a good engineer is to find that balance: not only to dig into calculations and theoretical materials but manage to put them into practice, not only create something new, but not ruin the heritage of the past, to learn lots of laws, figures becoming a walking encyclopedia, but still being able to explain his inventions to ordinary people. They say that some of the engineer’s inventions can be used by engineers only. But, on the other hand, all the great inventions were not easily accepted by the audience, so it is up to an individual to decide whether his/her creations will be regarded as genius centuries ago or he/she would look like a strange professor, living in a separate world, far from reality and the surrounding.
I believe that every profession is important and valuable in its own way. It is only a question of how you feel doing this or that kind of job. Every personality is unique and nobody will give you universal advice. So, if you are a creative thinker, full of ideas for improving this world, enthusiasm to learn much and hard, you are welcome to become an engineer. But if you are not ready to devote every minute of your life to examining things and sometimes monotonous testing of the laws of nature, do not waste your time receiving a degree.