 Hello, I am Professor Rajkumar Panth from Aerospace Engineering Department of IIT Bombay and I would like to give you a brief overview of the NPTEL course on Introduction to aircraft design. This course is spread over around 3 months with 30 hours of instruction and other material. The course will be mostly descriptive in nature. We will use less amount of mathematics, when wherever we use equations they will be simple equations, mostly we will be conveying the features of aircraft design through pictures and video clips. This course is more oriented towards aerodynamics and flight mechanics. Concepts related to controls, structures and propulsion and dynamics would be covered in much lesser detail. The course is meant for students of aerospace engineering, preferably from the third or the fourth year of the undergraduate course or the master students. But it can also be appreciated by any aviation enthusiast who has a basic science background. A special feature of this course is the explanation of some estimation procedures used in aircraft conceptual design through around 10 tutorials which will cover all the major aspects of a conceptual design exercise. And for that we are going to take a contemporary transport aircraft as a baseline. In addition to the material available online, we will conduct 3 sessions once every month, maybe more if needed to clarify the doubts that you may have and also to explain some new concepts. Before I talk about the course, let me give you a very brief idea about my background. On the academic front, I have 3 degrees in Aeronautical Engineering. The first of these was the undergraduate degree, Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh in 1983 and in my final year, I led a team of students who looked at conceptual design of a short haul regional business transport aircraft. Then I moved to IIT Madras for a master's program in Aeronautical Engineering sponsored by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. As part of my MTech project, I developed some software for transport aircraft design. Subsequently, I went for a PhD at Cranfield University in the College of Aeronautics. And my PhD thesis also is related to a topic in aircraft conceptual design. As far as my work experience is concerned, I have 5 years industrial experience in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited in the design and development division of which the first 3.5 years were spent in HAL Kanpur from 84 to 88 in which I worked on the structural aspects. And then I was promoted and transferred to HAL Nasik where I spent one and a half years. There I shifted to aerodynamics and flight testing. After that, I moved to academics at IIT Bombay where I have spent around 3 decades. These are the aircraft on which I have mainly worked on when I was in HAL. The ones that you see on the bottom is Dornier DO-228-212. And then when I shifted to Nasik, I spent most of my time working on MiG-27M Bahadur aircraft which at that time was being produced under license. There are some other aircraft on which I have worked. This is the HTT-32 aircraft designed by Indian design engineers of HAL Bangalore. It was then converted into a turboprop version called as the HTT-34. I also spent some time working on the structural modifications of HS748 Avro aircraft. And I spent about 4 to 5 months working on the shop floor in the final assembly of a wooden glider called as Ardhra. I have also flown aircraft in the cockpit. When I was a student of IIT Madras, the Meenam-Makkam flying club gave 8 hours of flight experience to students of the master's program. And when I moved to Cranfield University for my PhD, I flew 2 sorties of approximately 1 hour each on this Beagle-Pup aircraft. Let us have a look at the anticipated outcomes of this course. At the end of this course, you should be able to acquire some skills and some knowledge. You should be able to define and apply the concepts of aircraft conceptual design. Remember we will not look at any preliminary or detailed design calculations, only limit our attention to conceptual design. You will probably be able to understand why some aircraft look like the way they do and why they have those special configurations and special features. Through the tutorials that we are going to conduct, you will get an idea about the estimation of some important and useful parameters related to aircraft design using standard approaches. And we will also try to cover aspects which affect the design a lot such as acquisition cost and operating cost. I look forward to see you in the course. Thank you very much.