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The Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA; (英語:Aeronautics Institute of Technology〔http://www.ita.br〕)) is an institution of higher education and advanced research with emphasis in aerospace science and technology maintained by the Brazilian Federal Government with the support of the Brazilian Air Force. It is located in São José dos Campos, Brazil. ITA is rated as one of the top and most prestigious engineering schools in Brazil. The school's admission exams for its undergraduate courses (called ''vestibular'' in Brazil) are considered to be the most competitive in the country, and take place annually in over 25 cities throughout Brazil. Its undergrad program acceptance rate in 2013 was only 1.65% (120 accepted students out of 7285 nationwide applicants 〔http://www.ita.br/vestibular/estatisticas.htm〕). It is one of four institutes that encompass the Brazilian General Command for Aerospace Technology (CTA), having its facilities, along with its laboratories and R&D centers, inside the campus of CTA. ITA is often mistakenly considered to be a military institution, because of its location, but it is 100% civilian in nature, with a vast majority of civilian teachers, directors and students. The Air Force does help maintain the institution, though, and in exchange uses it for the training of its engineers. The institution was created in 1950, being responsible and contributing in a great extent for the research and development of the aerospace and defense sectors in Brazil, including the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research - INPE, Embraer and Avibrás. ITA offers regular 5-year engineering undergraduate courses (Bachelor of Engineering) and graduate programs including master's and doctoral degrees. All undergraduate students are granted full scholarships and board during entire five-year period. Complete residential facilities are offered to the students inside the campus, at a minimal cost. The college is known for being rigorous, demanding focus and a great effort from the students. ==History== ITA was idealized and initially run by the Marshal Casimiro Montenegro Filho, who was then a Coronel. Montenegro was an Air Force pilot and pioneer who had also received a degree in Engineering. The idea of building a school of excellence in Aeronautics Engineering and related fields came as the first step towards building a strong aeronautics industry in Brazil. A commission was created in 1946 in order to organize the Technical Center of Aeronautics (in Portuguese ''Centro Técnico de Aeronáutica'', or CTA), a sprawling facility that was later renamed, but kept the same acronym. ITA was to be the first institution in CTA, which would later harbor other aerospace related institutes. Marshal Casimiro Montenegro was very passionate and idealist, and was committed to creating the best school that could possibly be created. He visited the most renowned Aeronautics Engineering schools in the US at the time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wright Field (home of the Air Force Institute of Technology). There he hired MIT's professor Richard Harbert Smith to help develop a plan for such a school, which was dubbed "The Smith Plan". Prof. Smith would later become ITA's first rector. Montenegro hired renowned foreign professors and experts from various parts of the world to teach at ITA, the majority of them from MIT, influenced by Prof. Smith. At a given time of its history, ITA had teachers from more than 20 different nationalities in its faculty, an impressive number, considering it had (and still has) a faculty of little more than 100 teachers. Nowadays the overwhelming majority of the teachers are Brazilians, many of whom have graduated from ITA themselves.〔(Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica )〕 A book by Tércio Pacitti, a former ITA rector, mentions that Montenegro went to great lengths in order to be able to hire and maintain a 'super-star' faculty. Their pay was considerably high, a requirement to convince them to move to an unknown and poor country, as was Brazil in the '50s. He had, many times, to conceal their actual pay from his superiors in the Air Force, disguising it as other forms of expenditures. At the same time the team of professors brought to Brazil by Montenegro started to lecture in the Army Technical School (EsTE, nowadays IME, Instituto Militar de Engenharia), in Rio de Janeiro, CTA's and ITA's facilities began to be built in the city of São José dos Campos. This city was small and its economy was mainly rural, but Casimiro and his fellows predicted that, due to its location (between Brazil's biggest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and geography, it was a good place to be the birth of the aeronautics industry in Brazil. They turned out to be right, since about only 20 years later a company called EMBRAER, nowadays the third largest commercial jet manufacturer in the world, was started there, created and run by ITA's alumni. In 1950 ITA's basic facilities were finished and its first students moved there from Rio, to finish the courses they had started in the Army's facilities. Despite the fact ITA was run and maintained mostly by the Air Force, most of its students were civilians. That was a key point in the "Smith Plan", that ITA should form civilian engineers, to aid in the development of the Brazilian industry, specially the aeronautical one. Over the years a larger percentage of ITA's revenues began to come directly from the government. Nowadays the Air Force contributes with an amount that is somewhat proportional to the number of military students at ITA. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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