2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

On the Fly: The Development of a Hands-On, Projects-Based Aerospace Engineering Major at West Point

Presented at Aerospace Division (AERO) Technical Session 1 - Experiential Learning

West Point has included limited aeronautical sciences in its curriculum since 1918, graduating leaders who would play foundational roles in both the Army Air Corps (later US Air Force) and NASA. Today, the increasing integration of air, space, and ground domains has given West Point the impetus to expand its aerospace engineering curriculum. The faculty at West Point are currently in the process of developing the Academy’s first Aerospace Engineering major and find themselves in a unique position of building it “on the fly.” To create a major from inception while simultaneously enrolling the first graduating class into the program, they must develop and gain approval for each subsequent year’s curriculum only a year ahead of the students taking the courses. This paper will be the first in a series documenting and exploring the development of the new Aerospace Engineering major at West Point over the next four years. It will provide a brief history of aerospace engineering at West Point and summarize the current program within the Mechanical Engineering major. It will define the current 47-month core cadet experience and highlight its unique constraints on the available credit hours for the aerospace engineering curriculum. It will discuss how and why the faculty converged on the final Aerospace Engineering Curriculum informed by benchmarking against peer institutions. It will explore how the fledgling department will leverage both new aerospace engineering courses and existing mechanical engineering courses for curriculum and faculty optimization. The desired end state is a program that both satisfies ABET Accreditation requirements and maximizes high-quality instruction, with projects-based, hands-on learning leveraging flight laboratories in the department’s aircraft, a new wind tunnel (under construction), summer internships with DoD and industry partners, and culminating in a sponsored capstone design project.

Authors
  1. Col. Steven Chene Chetcuti United States Military Academy [biography]
  2. Brodie Hoyer United States Military Academy [biography]
Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025