Apart from teaching and research, some of my key responsibilities @ IIT Kanpur include

Faculty In-charge, Flight Laboratory (2017-present) & Gliding and Soaring Centre (2021-present)

The Flight Laboratory is a special and unique facility with few parallels among academic institutions in India. The lab includes 3 powered aircraft, and 2 powered gliders, a maintenance hangar, an almost kilometre-long runway. All aspects of the operations of this facility comply with DGCA regulations. The laboratory is managed by an able and well-qualified team led by the Chief Engineer.

The lab primarily serves two purposes: teaching and research. Nearly 300 students from IITK, other IITs, and other engineering colleges from across the country come to the Flight Lab every year to attend a 10-day course in flight experiments. The lab also provides the opportunity for faculty focusing in areas such as flight mechanics, parameter estimation, system identification, etc, to conduct experiments as validation of their theoretical developments. New research areas such as aircraft structural health and usage monitoring have also been initiated. A collaboration with Advanced Composites Division, CSIR-NAL, Bangalore has been initiated with a project from SERB on design and development of a fibre-optic based aircraft usage monitoring system that would be implemented on the Hansa aircraft in the Flight Lab. This research would go a long way in establishing the feasibility of health monitoring technology and its implementation for some of our other national assets such as military aircraft.

The Flight Lab also recently received approval to modify the Cessna aircraft for cloud-seeding operations.