Flying-Boat Aircraft Design

This project develops a flying-boat turboprop concept from mission thinking into analyzable aircraft geometry. Instead of stopping at a broad configuration choice, the work carries the design through aerodynamic loading, unloading cases, shear and bending reasoning, and a mission trajectory study that ties the numbers back to an operating profile.

Scope Mission definition, conceptual sizing, and wing-load interpretation

Outputs Spanwise load, shear, bending moment, and mission trajectory plots

Focus Turning a configuration idea into a mechanically credible aircraft story

Context University aircraft design work documented like a case study

Project Overview

The interesting part of this project is not only the aircraft concept itself, but the chain of reasoning behind it. Mission assumptions drive the sizing logic, which then feeds the aerodynamic loading and structural response discussion.

What I Worked Through

I carried the design through spanwise lift behavior, loading and unloading cases, resulting net load, shear force, bending moment, and twisting moment interpretation. That gave the concept a more grounded structural narrative.

Why It Matters

Aircraft concepts can look convincing long before they are actually supported by enough analysis. This page is meant to show the more useful part of the work: the discipline of testing whether the mission and the wing are telling a consistent story.

Tools Used

Aerodynamic analysis was performed in AVL and XFOIL, with the Schrenk approximation used for spanwise lift distribution. All structural load plots were generated in MATLAB and tied back to the mission-level performance estimates.

Analysis Results

Mission trajectory, aerodynamic loading, and structural response.

Spanwise lift distribution at 0 degrees angle of attack — Spanwise lift distribution at 0° angle of attack, computed using the Schrenk approximation method.

Load distribution along the wing span — Combined load distribution along the wing, showing the relationship between aerodynamic lift and structural weight.

3D mission trajectory for the flying-boat aircraft — Three-dimensional mission trajectory showing takeoff, climb, cruise at 1200 m, loiter, descent, and landing phases.

Bending moment distribution along the half-wing span, showing load path development from root to tip.

Schrenk method components for the flying-boat wing — Schrenk approximation components: elliptic and trapezoidal planform contributions to the spanwise lift.