Get X-Plane, it costs nearly nothing for the older retail version you
can get on E-Bay. If you learn it and like it, you can go buy the
newest version from the author.

It won't tell you anything structural (which does influence the
design), however it will give you aerodynamic information that was
unavaiable to even the big boys 10 years ago. Start off by studying
some of the more mature aircraft designs that you can find and modify
from there to make your design. At the very least you'll have
bulkhead shapes, airfoils, flight surface sizes/shapes and some
preliminary performance numbers when you're finished.

Regards

p.s. As far as structural analysis, you can start with an old textbook
from Statics 101, especially since you're talking about a steel tube
structure.

(Shin Gou) wrote in message . com...
Could anyone give me a suggestion of good airplane design consultant
with a reasonable service charge for light/sport airplane conceptual
design? A professional design agency would be great, but I believe a
graduate student in aeronautical engineering should be able to help me
out.

I am not an engineer and only have private pilot's paper test level
aeronautical knowledge(don't sneer at me. I passed the test in the
first try!), but I am now just fascinated with the idea of designing
and building and yes, flying my own airplane! I am brainstorming a
twin 3/4 seat camper design using two Rotax 912S or Jabiru 3300 with
reliability(twin), simplicity(tube and fabric?), ruggedness(tube and
fabric and STOL), comfortability(large cabin for two sleeping)and low
cost in mind. I know I probably wouldn't have enough money and time to
build it anytime soon, but I just can't wait for proving the design
and seeing the airplane layed out on the blue print!

So now my goal is to get to the first stage: the conceptual and
preliminary design. Then I will save money for structure design and
stability analysis etc. Finally I hope I can have the construction
plan and then from there I can build the plane piece by piece over
time.

I know nowadays such light airplane design could be totally done on a
computer and there're some dirty cheap entry-level airplane design CAD
softwares I can play with, but these softwares do need human input
with sufficient aeronautical knowledge even though they look like a
dummy's software for those enginners who operate 150K REAL airplane
design CAD systems. So is there anyone good at any of those softwares
like AirplanePDQ or even X-Plane PlaneMaker who would like to help me?

Thank you in advance.

Shin Gou