Today marks 50 years since Concorde's first British test. When Concorde arrived on the scene it was truly iconic and helped add a touch of glamour to the engineering industry. Heralded as a masterpiece of engineering with innovative carbon-fibre brakes, fly-by-wire controls and its record-breaking flight time, the plane’s design would mark the future of air travel.
Sadly, the aircraft had its last flight in October 2003, but a new supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) airliner worthy of taking the crown could have its first flight next year, and Boeing have unveiled plans for a new hypersonic jet, travelling around five times the speed of sound, which could fly from New York to London in just two hours.
Half a century on, engineers have far superior aircraft design modelling tools to work with than 50 years ago. However, there are still significant challenges.
Firstly, when designing a brand-new aircraft, it is important for engineers to develop a complete set of requirements for the aircraft system. Yes, they can partly be based on existing designs, but they might include the integration of innovative technologies that haven’t been used previously and will require extremely comprehensive testing to meet the necessary safety requirements. This is also the case when understanding how a new aircraft will interact with all other systems such as air traffic control, airline operational management etc.
Secondly, with increasing pressure to be more environmentally friendly and cut operational costs, reducing fuel consumption requires designers to minimise aircraft weight and increase engine efficiency. Yet, this it very difficult to achieve without sacrificing safety.
One of the most compelling uses of computer modelling is to enable engineers to complete comprehensive testing of the full aircraft design before building the first physical prototype aircraft. This is particularly important when previous flight test data from conventional aircraft won’t help understand what will happen when travelling at supersonic and hypersonic speeds. It can also be an expensive process if the prototype must be built several times over. Simulation can also help reduce the flight test time needed to ultimately achieve airworthiness and other certifications for the aircraft.
Back in the 1960s the engineers had limited design modelling tools, yet they were able to design a revolutionary machine. When Concorde was being developed, its design was one of the very first to use Computer Aided Manufacture (CAM) but at that point it was too early for the extensive use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) for mechanical parts. Since then CADCAM has been fully adopted by all aircraft manufacturers for the design and manufacture of physical parts.
In terms of how tools have progressed, the next phase of innovation was the creation of dynamic behaviour modelling that allowed designers to predict how parts of the aircraft will behave, not just their shape and composition. Now, it is possible for designers to use modelling tools to create a complete dynamic and operational model of an aircraft that can be fully tested before a real aircraft is ready.
This dramatically reduces the time required to create the final aircraft and the number of expensive redesigns required late in the aircraft development. The final aircraft is more likely to meet all requirements and to be adaptable to changing customer demands because of the extensive testing and redesign that is possible virtually, before making expensive physical changes to the aircraft and associated systems.
It’s also worth noting the collaborative design method between the French and British which made Concorde real. Sharing and simulating aircraft models and transferring enormous data files with today’s cloud computing have revolutionised collaborative working and would have been incredibly useful at the time to accelerate the work for the engineers involved on the project.
So, on the anniversary of Concorde, and with the next-gen Concorde on the radar, what is next for aircraft design? Ultimately, fuel efficiency, operational cost, operational constraints and safety are the main drivers of the civilian aerospace market. Therefore, any future designs will focus on these requirements. To this point, one of the most active areas of future aircraft development that may reduce fuel usage and noise is electrification.
A hybrid or fully electric aircraft may be able to take-off and land 24 hours a day without exceeding noise limits and so greatly expand airport capacities. In the future we will also see the role of predictive maintenance grow in prominence for aerospace. Data analysis about the performance, management and use of aircraft will improve significantly in the coming years with artificial intelligence enabling real-time monitoring of aircraft systems in operation, identifying faults and scheduling maintenance before they have any impact on safety or operational availability.
If supersonic and hypersonic aircraft can be engineered to reduce the cost of a passenger mile, maintain or improve safety at the same time as reducing the time taken to reach destinations, then it will be a major part of future aviation. However, with the tight operating margins of current airlines, supersonic and hypersonic may continue to be a niche market within the wider civil aerospace industry.
Understanding the future of hypersonic planes will be as much about rolling out a digital prototype as a physical one. Today’s modelling tools can address the technical and process challenges of aircraft design and make engineers’ dreams a reality. With this new technology, the boundaries of aerospace are being pushed to their limits and the future of air travel is set to transform. Whatever the successor to Concorde looks like, we can be assured that the aerospace engineering behind it will be as exciting and as ground breaking as the original.