1.1 How Aircraft Design Developed:AAD1

Lets take a minute and reflect on the aviation industry. 

Like every other industry, there is a boom of new design, new product, new services in the initial phase of the industry, where all the companies try to understand the market need and provide a solution to this. They give out different designs and configurations. After the market has been mature enought, there come a handfull of products which are more favoured. The reasons may be that the product was more comfortable, cheaper, easier to handle, easier to maintain and so on. However, there comes a point where the industry is lead by a particular product and other companies follow suit. And the market focuses on this particular product and product improvement is the next phase. 

So this is the analogy that i want to make with aircraft. Roughly speaking much of the advancement we see in the field of aviation up until the mid 20th century is because of war. The aircraft needed to be better, faster and more efficient. The use of Swept wing design and Jet engines used on B47 Bomber with its maiden flight on 1951, was one of the Boeings first such planes. The use of Jet engines and swept wing design was proven to be effective with this aircraft.

This proof of concept was the very thing that was missing for the application of jet engines and swept wing design in commercial aviation. Boeing decided on an aircraft which would symbolize this very trend and technology. B367-80 or in more colloqual terms- Dash 80 came into existence and took its first maiden flight in 1954. A four engine aircraft with low wing configuration was used as a bench mark for the development of B707. B707 later became the baseline design for the whole industry. And all the other companies started following this trend and design.

For the short range aircraft, Sud- est Caravelle with madien flight on 1956 was the first aircraft to use rear mounted engine for short haul flights. And also Fokker Friendship 1955 was one of the most fuel efficient aircraft on short haul flights which were used up until 2012. 

The baseline design was set with B707, however this didnt mean the end of the progressive steps in Aviation. Later the introduction of By Pass engines in 1960 and large Turbofan engies in 1970 were also contributed significantly in the field of aviation. However, with these innovations the aviation single handedly wept out other forms of transport for long haul travel and the airliner business was booming. Anyways, the airliners began to be comfortable with the already tested and good spread design that the new innovative designs found it difficult to break this trend set by B707. As lot of resources were spent in the development of this tube and wing type aircraft that the other configurations could not convince enough airliners.

Here are 2 examples of aircraft that were differnt and unfortunately didnt do well in the industry.

1. Boeing open rotor design. B7J7. This had  a huge savings in the fuel efficiency. However the predicted price hikes didnt happen so this new configuration was not prefered by many airlines and they sticked with more reliable and well tested Tube and wing configuration with engine below wing. 

2. Sonic Cruiser from Boeing could cruise at speeds of M0.95 with concentration on business people who could spend more money to travel faster in popular destination pairs.

However the market moved to aircraft which were not necessarily fast but were economic like B787.