CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A PASSENGER AIRCRAFT FOR AERIAL REFUELING OPERATIONS

The European project RECREATE (REsearch on a CRuiser Enabled Air Transport Environment) is investigating the design of new passenger aircraft and operation paradigms to drastically reduce fuel consumption and gas emission. One of the proposed concepts concerns with the introduction of air-to-air refueling between passenger aircraft (cruisers) and tanker aircraft (feeders). This paper focuses on the conceptual design of the cruiser and compares its performance with that of existing aircraft and others specifically designed to perform the same transportation mission, using direct and staging flight. AAR operations yield a potential fuel saving in the order of 15% with respect to direct flight (including the fuel used by the tanker) when specifically designed cruiser and tanker aircraft are employed to transport 250 passengers over a range of 5000nm, with one aerial refueling. Marginal fuel saving can be achieved also with respect to staging flight operations (i.e. intermediate refueling stops).