Having been assembled by Dr Frankenstein from spare body parts, Igor Sikorsky went on, perhaps inevitably, to invent the helicopter. He also taught himself to fly the contraptions too - which is an achievement that outclasses even Orville and Wilbur.
Seriously though, both the Wright brothers and Sikorsky were more than engineers who invented flying machines, they were accomplished and necessarily self-taught pilots.
Then there was the RAF engineering officer who invented the jet engine because he was frightened of propellors.
Sir George Cayley is a good bet for a university dissertation. Apart from being a brilliant aeronautical engineer, he was an educationalist who founded the London Mechanics Institute, which went on to become Birkbeck - one of the founding colleges of the University of London. He was one of those Victorian intellectuals with wide ranging interests and an effective follow through, that make him a fascinating subject for a dissertation.