Computer aided aircraft project design

Abstract

The computer can be used in many ways to assist in the project and design stages of aircraft development. As would be expected it was used first to assist in the more unwieldy calculations of the design stage. Massive calculation sequences which previously involved much tedious labour, or were effectively beyond the capacity of a design office to perform, suddenly became a few hours work for one or two technicians. Project analysis, being concerned with an earlier stage of development where calculations are simpler and more approximate, tended to remain largely unaffected. However, it became clear that the very simplicity of the preliminary project calculations would, at least in principle, allow the entire project analysis phase to be computerised, so allowing many parametric variations to be done in a short time with minimum effort. The natural follow-on to this was the optimising project analysis program of which examples now exist. With such programs one is able to predict an optimum configuration to meet a given requirement, given only the basic data to define the scope of the calculation.