What does an aerospace engineer do in a typical day on the job?
– question from name withheld Aerospace engineers may end up in a wide variety of different kinds of jobs, so it is a little tricky to describe “an average day in the life of….” Even so, it is safe to say that most of us work in an office environment where we sit at our desks much of the day performing our jobs. In addition, we all use computers in one way or another. A typical engineer will usually be working on tasks such as the following: • creating a computer model of a vehicle or portion of a vehicle • analyzing a computer model to determine its aerodynamic, structural, or thermal performance, or perhaps studying how well a component of the design integrates with another component or how easy it will be to assemble or maintain • testing a design using a computer simulation, a wind tunnel, or flight test to see how well it performs its intended purpose • designing software that controls how a vehicle flies or simulates its flight characteristics • performing trade studies to opti
