Career

This field is pretty new and under-developed as of now in India, primarily because of the huge investments it requires. The prominent government players, as rightly pointed out by Sanket, are ISRO, HAL, few DRDO labs like GTRE, ADA, DRDL and NAL. A few private companies like Tata, L & T, Mahindra, Taneja too have aerospace divisions, which basically cater to either the Indian government companies that I had mentioned above, or do consultancy activities for foreign aerospace companies. Aerospace engineering is a wide area, and we should not think that being an aerospace engineer means working in the field of aerodynamics or flight dynamics only. The subdivisions of an aerospace engineering curriculum usually consists of courses on propulsion, structures, robotics, navigation, control & guidance, manufacturing, spaceflight, aerodynamics, advanced fluid dynamics, material sciences and flight mechanics. There are a lot of companies like Godrej & Boyce aerospace, L & T, Merlin Hawk Aerospace etc. Who work in one of these areas (for eg. Godrej manufactures the liquid engines for ISRO, L & T makes the interstage structures for PSLV, Computational Research Labs are into flow and thermal simulations for big foreign MNCs like Boeing and Lockheed). Hence the scope of our work increases by manifolds if we are flexible to work in any one of the areas of aerospace engineering. Foreign MNCs like Airbus, Cassidian, GE and Boeing have R & D labs in Bangalore, employing more than 5000 people with expertise generally in the areas of CFD, FEM, solid modelling. If we see the manufacturing side, there are so many components in an aircraft or rocket that no engineer can know about all these sub components in his lifetime. And numerous industries work for delivering these parts, because not all have the money to set up an aircraft manufacturing plant in India (only government does presently, and Mahindra have invested after their takeover of an Australian company). .