Rob McDonald, Ph.D.
I’m a freelance aerospace engineer working through McDonald Aerospace LLC, based in San Luis Obispo, California. My work sits at the intersection of aircraft design tools, advanced aircraft design, electric flight, computational methods, and open source software.
What I Do
My consulting activities focus on:
- Conceptual aircraft design — rapid geometry, performance, and sizing methods to inform the early design process
- Electric flight and eVTOL design — flight physics for electric aircraft and advanced concept development for advanced air mobility
- Software and tool development — building pragmatic tools that help engineers do their job
- eVTOL market insight — help clients understand and navigate the eVTOL marketplace
Background
McDonald Aerospace LLC (2021 – present) Freelance consulting in advanced aircraft design, electric flight, and engineering software development.
Uber Elevate (2018 – 2021) Led the Technical Deep Dive team — although Uber was never going to develop our own aircraft, my team made sure we were a technically savvy customer. We set requirements, performed independent analysis of partner (and 3rd party) aircraft, conducted feasibility studies to push the art of the possible, investigated technologies to further the eVTOL ecosystem, and developed physics-based methods for evaluating electric propulsion, battery systems, acoustics, and vehicle performance.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (2006 – 2017) Professor of Aerospace Engineering - conducted research and taught aircraft design, performance, and multidisciplinary design optimization. Conducted more than $2.7M of sponsored research and secured more than $450k in donations supporting classes, clubs, and professional activity.
Open Source
I am the primary developer and project lead of OpenVSP — a parametric aircraft geometry tool originally developed at NASA and now maintained as an open source project. OpenVSP has been widely adopted by established aerospace players as well as innovative startups across the Mach-altitude envelope.
I created UnPlotter — a unique browser-based utility for extracting numerical data from figures in PDF files. If you have ever used conventional plot digitization tools, you will find that Unplotter is faster, easier, and far more accurate. A practical tool born from equal parts necessicity and obsessive attention to detail.
I have developed and released several other small tools over the years, many are listed on the Aero Tools and Plotting pages of this site. All of them are available on GitHub.