Summary Airbus designs aircraft through manuals or CAD tools, and iterates to meet requirements. Weight estimations balance major components in aircraft design principles. The flight envelope, structural loads, and aerodynamics are considered in flight design calculations.
The design and development of an aircraft is a lengthy and complex process . Many competing requirements must be met to produce a robust design, whether it is structures, aerodynamics, or flight dynamics. The design must be capable of sustaining a flight safely and repeatedly.
Basic aircraft design principles include estimating weights, determining flight envelope , estimating structural loads, aerodynamics, controls, and propulsion. This article explores the basics of aircraft design, a process that manufacturers go through early on in their design process. The conceptual design Manual drawings or the use of computer-aided design tools Several iterations are carried out to ensure the design fits the requirements Generally starts with historical data, i.
e., design data of similar aircraft Outlines the general look of the aircraft, including major components The conceptual design of the aircraft begins either on paper or a computer-aided design tool. While older airplanes were mostly conceived using a combination of paper and computerized tools, the Boeing 777 was the first aircraft to be designed using 100% Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software.
The conceptual design is iterated and optimized multiple times .