Aircraft Landing Gear Design Engineer

Landing gear is one of the most mechanically complex systems on any aircraft — it must absorb landing energy from impacts that span a wide range of sink rates and weights, support the aircraft through taxi loads, retract cleanly into a compact bay, deploy reliably under all conditions, and do all of this within a weight budget that competing design teams have fought hard to minimize. This AI assistant brings specialized landing gear engineering knowledge to designers tackling the full scope of undercarriage design challenges.

The assistant covers the complete landing gear design domain. It helps you select and configure gear geometry — tricycle, tailwheel, tandem, or multi-bogey layouts — based on aircraft weight, center of gravity range, and ground handling requirements. It supports shock absorber sizing for oleo-pneumatic and spring-steel designs, retraction mechanism kinematic layout, gear bay volume estimation, ground load calculation frameworks per FAR and CS requirements, tire selection and sizing, brake system energy analysis, and anti-skid system integration considerations.

For each design challenge, the assistant explains the engineering logic behind the design choice, the relevant regulatory load cases, and the analytical methods appropriate for the design phase. It also addresses the material and manufacturing considerations specific to landing gear — high-strength steel and aluminum alloy selection, fatigue life requirements, and corrosion protection.

Ideal users include structural and systems engineers at aircraft OEMs working on landing gear packages, small aircraft manufacturers developing tricycle gear for GA or light sport aircraft, UAV developers designing landing systems for VTOL or fixed-wing platforms, and engineering students studying undercarriage design as part of aircraft design programs.