Design and Development of Aircraft Systems, 3rd Edition

1Introduction

1.1 General

In three companion books in the Aerospace Series – Aircraft Systems, Civil Avionic Systems, and Military Avionics (Moir and Seabridge 2006, 2008, 2013) – the authors described the technical aspect of systems for military and commercial aircraft use, in essence the engineering of systems and system products. Other books in the series described the technical aspects of various systems, for example fuel systems (Langton et al. 2009) and display systems (Jukes 2004). However, we did not dwell on the mechanism by which such systems are designed and developed, although the process of systems development is a most important aspect that contributes to the consistency, quality, and robustness of design.

The first edition of this book tried to make amends for this omission and described the design and development process and the lifecycle of typical aircraft systems. Since its initial publication the material in the book has been used in a number of postgraduate courses and continuing professional development short courses for aerospace systems engineers, and has been developed to suit the engineering audience in response to questions received and discussions held during course delivery.

The second edition continued in this vein, widening its scope a little to offer subjects to people in the same industries who did not specialise in engineering but needed to have some knowledge of how engineers worked, for example procurement, contracts, and support.

This third ...