A Method for the Identification and Assessment of Critical Technologies Needed for an Economically Viable HSCT

Presented at the 1st AIAA Aircraft Engineering, Technology, and Operations Congress, Anaheim, CA, September 19-21, 1995.Researchers from the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) at the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech have been developing over the past three years a comprehensive methodology for the integration of aircraft design and manufacturing. NASA's High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) concept has been selected as a pilot project for this study because of its potential global transportation payoffs and impact on U.S. world competitiveness. The proposed methodology is based on a Concurrent Engineering/ IPPD approach, and, in this case, is specifically applied to the design of an HSCT. The procedure employs the use of a Design of Experiments approach to facilitate the development of Response Surface Equations which capture the essence of sophisticated, computationally intense disciplinary analyses tools and replace them by simple second order polynomial equations. Since this aircraft has to be economically competitive to current subsonic transports, emphasis has been given throughout this study on understanding and assessing its economic viability. The determination of this objective is based on the required average yield per Revenue Passenger Mile ($/RPM), a metric that captures the concerns of all interested parties. The latest developments of ASDL's new methodology for the design of such affordable and reliable aircraft are outlined in this paper. However, the main objective of this paper is to describe the overall approach from concept formulation to concept feasibility and the identification and assessment of all possible means of achieving economic viability. Finally, different means of improving the economic viability of a hypothetical HSCT are examined, and their relative impact is quantified