Skip to main content
BookintermediatePaid

Aircraft Structures

by David J. Peery · McGraw-Hill

Classic 1950 textbook on the stress analysis of aircraft structures, covering beams, thin-walled sections, shear flow, torsion of closed cells, and buckling of sheet-stringer panels. Readers learn the hand-calculation methods behind wing and fuselage structural design.

Visit resource

This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure

More resources on Aircraft Structures

WebsiteFree

nasa.gov

NASA.gov is the official site of the U.S. space agency, offering mission news, research results, data, and STEM education resources. It features engineering articles, technical briefs, simulations, multimedia, and classroom materials for students and educators.

WebsiteFree

Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook – Airframe (FAA-H-8083-31B)

Free official FAA handbook for airframe mechanics. Chapter 1, Aircraft Structures, describes fuselage types (truss, monocoque, semimonocoque), wing spars, ribs and skins, empennage, and landing gear. Later chapters cover structural repair of sheet metal, composites and wood. Primary source that grounds the analysis texts in real hardware: what stringers, longerons, bulkheads and spars look like and how they are repaired.

CourseFree

Introduction to Aerospace Structures and Materials (DelftX)

Best free video-based entry point before Megson or MIT 16.20; builds intuition for why airframes are designed as they are. Self-paced TU Delft course on how aircraft and spacecraft structures are built and kept safe. Covers material properties and the operating environment, metals and composites manufacturing, structural elements and load paths, loads and stresses, and fatigue.

BookPaid

Airframe Structural Design: Practical Design Information and Data on Aircraft Structures (2nd Edition)

Practitioner handbook from a former Lockheed structures engineer. It covers design loads, materials, wing, fuselage and empennage component design, joints, cutouts, fatigue and damage tolerance, and weight-efficient detail design, using tables, charts and example sizing calculations. Where Bruhn covers analysis, Niu covers design: how real wings and fuselages are laid out and detailed for fatigue and damage tolerance.

BookPaid

Analysis and Design of Flight Vehicle Structures

Industry reference for sizing airframe and space-vehicle structures, drawn mostly from NACA reports and full of worked numerical examples. Covers section properties, torsion, bending and shear stresses, beam web design, column and plate buckling, crippling, joints, and fatigue. Unmatched practical sizing methods (crippling, tension-field webs, lug analysis) that academic texts skip.

BookPaid

Aircraft Structures for Engineering Students (7th Edition)

Standard undergraduate aircraft structures textbook. The modern, full-syllabus text between Peery (classic, dated) and Sun (mechanics-focused): airworthiness, fatigue and composites alongside thin-walled beam theory. Part A covers elasticity, energy and matrix methods, plate bending, and buckling. Part B covers airframe loads, airworthiness, fatigue, thin-walled beams in bending, shear and torsion, structural idealization, wing and fuselage analysis, composites, and aeroelasticity.

See all Aircraft Structures resources →