John P. Fielding

John P. Fielding spent twelve years in industry, first as an engineering apprentice and then as a design engineer on the BAe 748, the 146 and the Nimrod, and returned to Cranfield in 1975 as its first ARB research fellow. He had arrived there in 1968 as a student on the aircraft vehicle design course, then advanced from lecturer through senior lecturer to Professor of Aircraft Design, later heading the aerospace engineering group in the School of Engineering. He is now professor emeritus, with reliability, maintainability and operational effectiveness running through his own research, teaching and consultancy. Introduction to Aircraft Design, which came out in the Cambridge Aerospace Series in 1999, walks a student from a requirement through configuration, structures, propulsion, airframe systems, avionics and the arithmetic of acquisition and operating cost, drawing on programmes that worked and programmes that did not. A parametric study of a hypothetical 500-seat transport runs through it as a worked example. The second edition of 2017 added sections on uninhabited aerial vehicles and refreshed the cost data.