What's it like to be a grad student at GT-AE?

Nearly 200 hopeful undergraduates got an answer when they took a tour of the Georgia Tech campus on Jan. 16.

About a half-dozen of those students took a more intensive tour of the School of Aerospace Engineering, where they were introduced to the work of the UAV, the Combustion , the Center for Advanced Machine Mobility (CAMM), and the High Powered Electric Propulsion (HPEP)labs.

"At Georgia Tech, our students are expected to do work that will change the way the world works," said Professor J. P. Clarke, one of the faculty who escorted the students. "It's an exciting place to explore what's possible."

Clarke gave students an insider's look at his work on Continuous Decent Arrival (CDA), an approach to flight navigation that has drastically reduced cost and environmental impact of air travel. Supported through both simulation and test flights, CDA flattens out the usually steep arrival trajectory of airplanes coming in for a landing. Because the planes hover at a higher altitude and use less thrust, they produce less noise and consume less fuel.

The concept  has been widely praised and even received a Best Innovation award from the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (AGIFORS). But Clarke did not spend any time boasting about accolades.

"What this all shows is that you can have a huge impact on the way air transportation operates," he said.

"And air transportation is a critical component of the global economy. Really, it's the backbone: if you have something to sell, you need to move it. Air cargo is a leading indicator of economic activity."

Find out more about CDA.

The three-day visit to campus was fully-funded by FOCUS, a Georgia Tech outreach program that seeks to attract the best and brightest underrepresented minority students for graduate study. Several thousand undergraduate students applied for less than 200 FOCUS tour openings.