Introducing undergraduate students to systems, control, and performance concepts: experiences in teaching a course on flight systems

A number of US universities are interested in introducing elementary systems and control concepts to freshmen or sophomore engineering students. The article describes our experiences in developing and teaching such a course to sophomores in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. The course, entitled “Performance of Aircraft and Spacecraft”, is organized around consideration of flight vehicles. Several innovative features of this course are described, but the emphasis is on systems topics introduced in the course, such as modeling and system properties, control concepts, and system performance. Our experiences in developing and teaching this course illustrate the challenges and benefits of teaching modeling, systems, control, and performance topics at an introductory university level. We describe important features of the particular aerospace engineering course and its treatment of flight systems issues. We discuss the course background and overview and the systems, control, and performance features of the course. The discussion emphasizes the important ways in which flight issues are introduced and the ways that an integrative systems perspective is developed. The reader interested solely in the systems and control lessons learned from the course, but not the flight-related issues, can skip these three sections and proceed to the section on systems, control, and performance: lessons learned