Free Aircraft Design & Engineering Software
Aerodynamics, geometry and trajectory work used to mean expensive licences. Today's open-source stack covers conceptual sizing, airfoil analysis, CFD-style solvers and rocket or UAV trajectory simulation.
Top picks
- openrocket — Model-rocketry aerodynamics and trajectory simulation software (★ 3,160, see repo)
- AeroSandbox — Aircraft design optimization made fast through computational graph transformations (e.g., automatic differentiation). Composable analysis tools for… (★ 1,364, MIT)
- RocketPy — Next generation High-Power Rocketry 6-DOF Trajectory Simulation (★ 1,107, MIT)
- mavsim_public — Repository for the textbook: Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice, by Randy Beard and Tim McLain (★ 1,027, GPL-3.0)
- OpenVSP — A parametric aircraft geometry tool (★ 860, see repo)
- elodin — Elodin simulation and flight software monorepo. (★ 549, Apache-2.0)
- NeuralFoil — NeuralFoil is a practical airfoil aerodynamics analysis tool using physics-informed machine learning, exposed to end-users in pure Python/NumPy. (★ 490, MIT)
- awesome-aerospace-engineering — A list of aerospace engineering learning resources (★ 459, GPL-3.0)
- FLOWUnsteady — An interactional aerodynamics and acoustics solver for multirotor aircraft and wind energy (★ 389, MIT)
- T-MATS — An open source thermodynamic modeling package completed on behalf of NASA. The Toolbox for the Modeling and Analysis of Thermodynamic Systems… (★ 335, Apache-2.0)
- tigl — The TiGL Geometry Library to process aircraft geometries in pre-design. (★ 306, Apache-2.0)
- Aviary — NASA's aircraft analysis, design, and optimization tool (★ 290, see repo)
FAQ
- Are these projects really free?
- Yes. Every entry is an open-source repository. Some maintainers accept donations, and licences differ, so check the licence on the project page before commercial use.
- Where do the downloads come from?
- Straight from GitHub: the project's release page for binaries, or a source archive of the default branch.
- How were these projects chosen?
- We search GitHub for aviation and flight keywords, then filter for relevance, activity and star count, and drop anything abandoned or unrelated.