Open course ware

TINA SRIVASTAVA: All right, so flying at night is really fun. And in order to get your private pilot, you actually have to fly at night. You even have to do a short cross-country flight at night. So it's really important for you to understand the dimensions of flying at night. And it's something else to set personal minimums about. But overall, I love flying at night. It's one of my favorite things to do. And this is actually a picture that the person sitting on the right seat took when I was landing in Bedford. So what do you see in this picture? Who can identify where the runway is? Can you at least see the runway? All right, this just-- yes? In the yellow shirt. AUDIENCE: It's right after the yellow cross. And there's red and yellow lights on either side of the runway. And the very end of it is marked with a line of green lights. TINA SRIVASTAVA: That's right. So the green line is marking the threshold of the runway. Along the sides of the runwa...

TINA SRIVASTAVA: So we're going to dive into human factors. There are kind of two halves to it. So about halfway through we'll take a break. But let's just do the first half of it now, because I don't want to run over into Mark's upcoming talk at 4:00. So human factors is something that's kind of near and dear to me. I actually really like this subject. When I was an undergrad, I took the course 16.400. I really strongly recommend it. We can only cover a very small amount today. You know, I have less than an hour to get through all of this for you. But I think it's really an interesting class, and it's very pertinent to everything related to aircraft and aerodynamics. And this class 16.400 was one of my favorite classes. Still today, I refer back to it. And one of the things we did was also go through different NTSB reports. So I gave a link there as well. And you can read through accident investigations. And not all of them are scary. You ...

TINA SRIVASTAVA: I think it's a really basic point of curiosity in the world, and people that come to MIT, who are very passionate and want to change the world, should know how airplanes fly, some information about aviation, and the incredible feat of humankind to be able to fly through the air. SARAH HANSEN: Today on the podcast, we're talking flight, specifically how a course has been designed and refined to allow hundreds of students to pursue a path toward flying. TINA SRIVASTAVA: I thought that it was really important that any student that's interested in this have the opportunity to learn about airplanes and learn how to become a pilot themselves. SARAH HANSEN: Welcome to "Chalk Radio," a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen, from MIT OpenCourseWare. In this episode, we'll be talking about MIT's flight school with two of its instructors, Philip Greenspun and Tina Srivastava. In our conversation, they s...