Requirements for Future Civil Aircraft

Extract

Requirements fall into two categories: —

(i) the demands of the market leading to a capacity requirement, which, dependent on the technical solutions, leads to a market requirement in terms of the number of aircraft.

(ii) the technical requirements in terms of the vehicle characteristics required to provide the most competitive aircraft to achieve maximum market penetration.

An appreciation of future civil requirements is presented as seen through the eyes of a project engineer rather than a market research economist. The title of the symposium suggests a focusing of attention on two main fields of air transport, namely, the successors to the supersonic long-range aircraft and the large subsonic short-range aircraft. It is, however, the intention to broaden the survey to cover the major areas of activity in civil aviation, since in many ways there may be inter-relations between the developments in different fields.