 Hello everyone, welcome to this course on Introduction to Flight. In this course we shall cover very basic overview of essentially how does a plane fly and what are the important aspects related to flight of an aircraft in the lower atmosphere of the earth. So the course will focus only on flight of aircraft. So it will not cover rockets, spacecraft, missiles and other interplanetary objects, it will be limited to only aircraft. Since young age all of us are interested to know how does a plane fly, we also are curious to look at the flight of birds, we want to understand how the performance of an aircraft is measured or estimated in terms of what happens during takeoff, climb, cruise, turning, maybe gliding, landing and these phases. So the major part of the course would talk about the performance of the aircraft but that is the second half. The first half of the course will consist essentially about introduction to aircraft, its various components, introduction to the atmosphere in which the aircraft operates and then we will go on to look at basic fluid mechanics focusing mainly on incompressible flow and looking at some instruments, how they function, how they measure the various parameters like pressure, air speed and then we will move on to some idea about drag, lift. One important part of the course would be to dispel the myths or the wrong information that we see or read in textbooks and other documentation about how a plane flies. The mechanism of generation of lift is wrongly described in many textbooks as well as pilot operating manuals. So we will try to dispel those myths and look at the true and the real reasons or the basic physics behind the flight. We will move on to certain interesting and relevant aspects regarding flight as I mentioned types of drag, we will look at a few equations and theorems like the Bernoulli's principle, we will look at the Kwandai effect, we will look at Mach number and with that we will be explaining how an aircraft flies. There also will be some coverage of various types of propulsion systems. All in all this is going to be a course which will be most suitable for students after their school at the undergraduate level in engineering or science who are curious and interested to know about essentially how does a plane fly and we will end with one section on operational aspects of aircraft, one to do with its operation as a carrier of aircraft and cargo, the range and the payload tradeoff and we will also look at the tradeoff or the diagram between the velocity and the load factor called as the VN diagram. Finally we will look at the ultimate flyers, the birds and we will try to get a very brief idea about the flight principles and aerodynamics of flapping wing vehicles. So we look at birds and we will look at some other biological inspirations which have made our understanding of flight better. So I welcome you all to participate in this course and do give us some feedback after the end of the course on how we can improve the contents. An important point to be noted is that this course is based on the recordings of a similar course which was conducted in the classrooms in IIT Bombay. So the videos would be showing a classroom studio and there might be also some interactions with my students in that course at that time. So it has not been recorded especially for the online audience but it has been adapted from the recordings of the course made in a classroom environment. Thanks a lot and see you all at the course.