Conceptual Aircraft Design

2Aircraft Familiarity, Aircraft Design Process, Market Study

2.1 Overview

The ve ry first thing when studying aircraft design, as the topic of study in this book, is to get familiar with the product hardware as an introduction for the newly initiated reader. The road to a successful aircraft design has a formal step‐by‐step approach through phases of activity and must be managed. It is appropriate that readers should have some idea of how aircraft design projects are managed in a company and this is covered at an early stage of study. It is recommended that newly initiated readers read through this chapter because it tackles important parts of the work. To start a project requires generation of customer specifications, based on which the configured aircraft has the potential to succeed. A small part of the coursework starts in this chapter.

The go‐ahead for a programme comes after careful assessment of the design with a finalised aircraft configuration that evolved during the conceptual study (i.e. Phase I). The prediction accuracy at the end of Phase I must be within at least ±5%. In Phase II of the project, when more financing is available after obtaining the go‐ahead, the aircraft design is fine‐tuned through testing and more refined analysis. This is a time and cost consuming effort, with prediction accuracy now at less than ±2 to ±3%, offering guarantees to potential buyers. This book does not address project definition activities (i.e. Phase II); these are in‐depth studies ...