Besides these four, Punjab Engineering College at Chandigarh and Madras Institute of Technology offer various courses in aerospace engineering. A good number of private engineering colleges too have come up across the country, namely, Amity Institute of Aerospace Engineering Research and Studies (UP), IIAEIT (Pune), Indian Institute of Aeronautical Engineering (IIAE) at Dehradun, SRM University (Chennai), VSM Institute of Aerospace Engineering & Technology (Bengaluru), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Technology (Gujarat), Hindustan Institute of Technology & Science (Chennai) and Noorul Islam University (Tamil Nadu).
The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has also started a B.Tech programme in aeronautical engineering in ‘on campus’ mode. Pune-based Aeronautical Engineering and Research Organisation (AERO) has developed course curriculum to facilitate the programme.
Coming to the fee structure, IITs and other government colleges charge Rs 200,000-300,000 for the four-year course, while private institutions may charge upward of Rs 500,000. At IITs, this includes hostel accommodation and mess charges. Indian Institute of Space Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, does not charge any fees for a course in aerospace engineering; even messing is free.
“All five-year dual-degree students and two-year M.Tech students get MHRD scholarship of Rs 8000 per month. Some of them get other sponsored scholarships (from Boeing, GE, Honeywell, etc) of higher values. All doctoral students get scholarship to the tune of Rs 14,000 per month for the first two years and Rs 15,000 per month for the next two years (MHRD recently announced an increase in these figures to Rs 18,000 and Rs 20,000, respectively). Most of the undergraduate students also get either state or national or various institute scholarships. There are many endowment and sponsored scholarships (from DRDO, Boeing, etc) for the undergraduates as well. Many of these scholarships are about two-three times the yearly expenses of the students,” says Prof. Sinhamahapatra of IIT Kharagpur.
The big picture: know your role
The aerospace industry provides you with a number of career options from engineers, scientists and technicians upstream to other downstream business management roles—whereby you can pick a job role matching your area of interest. Most of the roles, however, can be grouped under some broad categories: managers, analysts, consultants, scientists, field engineers and design engineers.
Those who are interested in R&D can design a satellite launcher, test the latest environment-friendly turbine or create the latest fighter plane as part of the production team. You may also consider joining the human resources team of a large aerospace manufacturer to develop strategies for attracting, recruiting and retaining skilled employees.
During the design process of an aircraft, the aerodynamicist works hard with other design engineers to make sure that the airplane moves easily through the air. The design engineer, on the other hand, decides how long a plane has to be to hold a certain number of people, how wide it should be, where the wings need to be and how strong the materials should be.
As an electronics engineer, you can design the sensors and connections that tell the pilot of an aircraft that things are fine or that there is a problem. Mathematicians are also hired by the aerospace industry and if you are wondering why, these are the ones who develop the math formulae that engineers use to design their work. The physicist is another behind-the-scenes part of a design team, analysing a scientific problem for the aircraft such as overcoming the heat barrier or computing a trajectory.
Who’s hiring?
Delving a little deeper, we can group major recruiters in this field under three broad categories. [stextbox id=”info”]
“The compensation package is dependent on the domain knowledge and nature of experience that the person carries.”
— M.M.T. Nambi, vice president-aviation and business consulting at Ramco Systems
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The first category is the government/public sector, which includes organisations like ISRO, DRDO, HAL, Air India and National Laboratories.
Then there is the private/IT sector, which includes major engineering companies like Ashok Leyland and Godrej—these firms now have divisions dealing with the aerospace industry and are also recruiting. Earlier, there were small IT companies that specialised in analysis jobs for MNC clients like Boeing and Airbus, but now IT majors like TCS, Wipro and Ramco have also got into this field.
The third category can be MNCs as several multinational firms have set up their operations in India. GE has a large operation in Bengaluru and is probably the largest in this group. Others include Honeywell, Safran, Cessna, Volvo, Airbus, and Boeing-specialised software companies like Ansys & Fluent, Fluidyn and Cd-Adapco.
Explains Prof. Sriram, “Aeronautical engineers deal with the design and analysis of aircrafts, while aerospace engineers deal with aircrafts and space-crafts. In the Indian context, maintenance is also included, though traditionally, aviation (airline and airport operations) and maintenance are considered separate; to give an example, Tata and Volvo design and manufacture buses while the buses are operated and maintained by other road transport companies. The job categories are parallel to this—HAL, DRDO and ISRO design and produce aircrafts and spacecrafts, so these employ aerospace engineers to design and build these aircrafts and spacecrafts. Air India or other airlines operate the aircrafts and they have job opportunities in aircraft maintenance, which means keeping the aircraft in proper condition so it can be operated safely.
I know hypermesh and Nastran software but i want a industrial training on the aeronautical field base on this software. My qualification is B. E aeronautical engineering.