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The University of Newcastle's Aviation programme has adopted various teaching philosophies over its formative years, to its current holistic emphasis on the development of cognitive structures in the student pilot throughout the programme. The development of appropriate tertiary educational precepts to satisfy the requirements of academic endeavor and the needs of the aviation industry has provided an opportunity to develop from carte-blanche an emerging discipline of career aviators. The paper argues for the adoption of a holistic approach to the needs of the graduate, the aviation industry and of academia, as a necessary basis for a University Aviation programme and proposes an integrated treatment of the technical training curriculum structured on schema development.

The paper discusses the employment of eigensolutions of finite element structural models as a tool to assess airframe structural integrity. It is aimed at the aviation technical manager with a general tertiary background, thereby including development from first principles of fundamental concepts required for the derivation and application of an inverse correlation technique. Consideration of the physical and mathematical properties of structural eigensolutions indicates this technique's potential to provide a global assessment of the structural integrity of structures representative of simplified aircraft wings for which finite element structural models exist or can be developed.