DOES THE AIR TRANSPORT MARKET NEED "UNCONVENTIONAL AIRCRAFT CONFIGURATIONS"?

In the past the engineering spirit and imagination was the driver for new aircraft developments, combined with new technologies, which have led to new aircraft programmes, each new programme showing at least a 10% economical benefit to its competing flying aircraft. During the last two decades technological progress seems to have decelerated or – in other words the aircraft industry has achieved a high technical standard and has become a mature industry. There are however a lot of new technical concepts like Flying Wing, Tandem Wing, Three Surface Aircraft Concepts etc. where the inventors claim enormous advantages compared to today’s conventional airliners. But does the market need these new vehicles? The Institute of Aeronautical Engineering at the Technische Universitat Munchen has initiated a scenario process with students and experts from industry to establish and analyse a series of air transport scenarios for the year 2030 out of which the market possibilities for future civil transport aircraft have been identified. In all scenarios, most of the market requirements could be fulfilled by conventional configurations, but sometimes with some stringent requirements like for example noise requirements. Some of the requirements however lead to configurations in unconventional layout. In a next step these unconventional configurations have been further analysed with respect to additional needs in new technologies, development methods and tools and operational requirements. Based on these additional demands from all scenarios, a fairly robust technology strategy can be developed. The paper will shortly describe the scenario process, will develop the methodology to define the robust technology strategy and will use a typical, possible scenario to demonstrate and validate the proposed method.