Essay – An Industry Runs out of Ideas

Now in the mid-1990s the aircraft industry finds it a challenge to build a new aircraft to replace one designed within the past 20 years. For anything built in the past 10 years, the manufacturers find it virtually impossible to build a replacement with worthwhile improvements — and won’t be able to until, maybe in another 10 years, a few more ideas straggle through the door.

Airbus for instance thinks Boeing has made a big mistake with the improved, but hardly advanced, 737-X. By choosing to market a warmed-over version of the 737 instead of building an entirely new aircraft, Boeing won’t be able to build a new 150-seater for decades, Airbus says. So in the long term, Seattle has locked itself into an inferior position against the A320.

The argument runs like this: If you’ve already got a plane in production, you need to find some payoff from spending money on a new one. These days the cost of significant improvements (fly-by-wire, a glass cockpit, the latest engines) can outweigh their benefits, so the new aircraft might not really be any better at all, leaving Boeing unable to justify a new plane.

But the argument works Boeing’s way too: The 737-X should be relatively cheap. Maybe it will not be as easy on fuel as the A320, nor as easy to maintain nor as attractive to passengers who want a slightly wider cabin. But that won’t matter if it is cheap enough. It all depends on how the bean counters’ numbers come out, and increasingly the bottom line says “do nothing.” Sometimes it says “update.” Rarely does it say “build a new aeroplane.”

British Airways is trying to get the makers to shift their research and development into improving manufacturing techniques rather than force-feeding gee-whizzery into the aircraft. There is now more scope to lower production costs than to raise operating efficiency, Ba says.

True, Ba is also trying to get the manufacturers to build an entirely new aircraft, the superjumbo. But a 747 might yet become a more efficient solution, even if it is not big enough to solve Ba’s private problem with the shortage of capacity at Heathrow. The drought of easy improvements is also showing up in the lack of progress in some of the few new aircraft that are being built. A contentious example is the Eurofighter 2000. Is the Eurofighter really much better than the F/A-18C? Is it any better than the F/A-18E at all?

The Eurofighter is supposed to be more agile and have a lower radar signature than the Hornet, but the $US90 billion cost of development and production could have bought the Euro-partners more than twice as many F/A-18Cs (2,000 at $US45m each, and Mdc could have arranged significant offsets). The enlarged F/A-18E can carry a bigger load further, a much more useful attribute than super agility, especially since both aircraft would carry long-range Aim-120 Amraam missiles, which promise many more beyond-visual-range kills without close-in dogfights.

One has to doubt the inherent worth of an aircraft project driven by industrial rather than technical considerations. In this case, Britain, Germany and their partners need aerospace jobs. But are they producing a worthwhile new fighter in the process?

Of course, technology goes in fits and starts, and sometimes a significant technological advance upsets the applecart by offering huge payoffs for development. That is what happened after World War II, when the pace of technological development accelerated enormously because of the sudden impact of jet and electronic technology. That skyrocket didn’t burn forever, though, and in retrospect we can now see our woes began with a dramatic slowdown in the military industry’s rate of progress in the 1960s.

The F-100 Super Sabre was obsolescent within 10 years of its first flight in 1953, because much better aircraft appeared in the meantime. The Phantom was not obsolescent 20 years after it first flew in 1958. Indeed, the Phantom was the hinge in the curve; it appeared right at the end of the great leap forward. Before the F-4, progress was rapid, and most aircraft faded rapidly; after it, progress was slow, and new fighters lasted for decades.

Turbofans, lighter materials and microprocessors produced better combat aircraft in the 1970s, but they never stimulated the numbers of new types that blossomed in the 1950s. New electronics technology, because it was largely independent of the airframe, was not really much of a stimulus at all to building new aircraft. Microprocessors appeared in the teen series fighters, but they were also retrofitted into all those 1960s types that were soldiering on so splendidly.

The airliner industry has made more consistent progress than the combat business because airliners wear out faster. Airlines buy aircraft to fly them, whereas air forces buy aircraft mostly to have them, in case of war. So there are fewer airliner upgrades thus keeping new airframes on the drawing board. But even in the airliner industry there are signs that most of the good ideas have been thought of, at least for the moment.

First there is the astonishing and increasing sameness in configuration: a tubular fuselage with podded engines under a low mounted wing and an utterly conventional tail assembly. Aircraft builders occasionally talk about other configurations, but none, with a few rare exceptions, ever builds one. The inescapable conclusion: the best configuration was arrived at four decades ago with Boeing’s 707. No new ideas here. (The same thing happened with piston-engined fighters. Only the arrival of jets blasted the single-engined fighter out of the configuration shared by Spitfires, Bf 109s, Zeros and Mustangs.)

All jetliners also now have turbofan engines and the consensus is increasingly emerging that the best number to have is two, since the twin’s low maintenance cost outweighs its greater purchase cost. You do however have to buy more thrust in a twin-engined airliner, so it doesn’t crash if one engine fails on takeoff.

Then there is the increasing tendency to make a new airliner out of an old one’s fuselage, stretching it and maybe changing the wings and engines. Don’t let Airbus know anyone remembers, but the A330 and A340 have stretched A300 fuselages, and the A310 was originally designated as only an A300 version (the A300B10). Airbus was not the first to do this. Boeing fashioned the 737 barrel from the 727’s and considered a similar move with the 767-X, later 777.

Stretch potential and the ease of updating podded engines are among the most important attributes of the 707 derived layout. And the cheapness of changing fuselage length and engine type has only discouraged what little tendency there has been to develop new aircraft. Sometimes the new fuselage length is called a new version; sometimes, especially when new technology is mixed in, it becomes a new model.

Which brings us to badge engineering. It sells Holden Commodores as Toyota Lexcens, so why shouldn’t it sell British Aerospace 146s as Rj70s or Avroliners? Aircraft makers, unable to offer new designs, have increasingly taken to renaming old ones, as if anyone were fooled. All the while, few new ideas are coming through.

Going against the trend, there was a simple new development with a big payoff in the 1980s: the winglet, an upturned wingtip extension inspired by similar feathers on some birds. Like podded engines and swept wings, the winglet was a simple boost to efficiency that everyone quickly adopted once the benefits were known. But it did not lead to new airframes and, besides, Boeing now seems to think it was a false lead: in the 777 the weight is being spent on greater span instead.

So where do airliners go from here? Not far, apparently. The 777 is with us, flying about and looking for all the world like a 767 or A300. Under the skin — or, more to the point, inside the nacelles – it is more sophisticated, having pushed engine technology significantly ahead into higher thrust ratings and greater bypass ratios. But the A330 and A340 did not die a sudden death once Seattle’s new twin was offered on the market. The 777 may be more sophisticated, but once the buyer picks up part of the development bill, it cannot be decisively more cost-effective.

So don’t expect too many new airliners, as Boeing’s other projects suggest. Cheap 737-Xs (they’ll get the -600, -700 and -800 series numbers) will compete with more sophisticated A320s, and while nothing is announced yet, my money would be on Boeing choosing to enlarge the 747 rather than co-developing a new superjumbo with Airbus.

New design technology gives hope. Boeing has adopted a Dassault computer design system that eliminates much of the paperwork and wooden mockups involved in developing a new aircraft. That makes designing any given aircraft cheaper, but still the makers have to think of reasons why they want a new design in the first place.

At first sight the military business appears even worse off because, as noted above, combat aircraft do not wear out as fast as airliners. They usually last until they are no longer competitive, and in a world where airframe improvements are painfully slow and electronic upgrades relatively easy, that can be a long time between drinks.

And so we have the spectacular prospect of seeing the B-52 serve through to its 50th birthday because any replacement is not worth building. The present aircraft, designed to a late World War II specification, does the job well enough, thanks. New fighters are also showing the sort of sameness exhibited by airliners. Compare the configurations of the Su-27, MiG-29, F/A-18, MiG-31, F-15 and, most disappointingly, F-22. Clearly, we have discovered the best layout for a twin-engined jet fighter.

But there are two reasons to think there will be a few more new combat aircraft being built.

First, since little is changing, a new fighter using cheap 10-year-old technology might keep you up with the Joneses these days. Taiwan has taken that route with the new Ching-Kuo (a modern looking fighter that looks like a cross between an F/A-18 and an F-5 though performs more like the latter) and it could be argued that France adopted a similar strategy at least until the 1960s. This cannot happen in the civil market, because there will always be slightly more cost-effective new aircraft available. But not all air forces can get access to the latest fighters and, for them, near enough might have to be good enough.

Second, there is a new technology that could upset the applecart: stealth. In the same way that jets and electronics put the World War II fighter out of the race, stealth might mean many more combat aircraft will need replacing. That could not happen in the 1980s when the only stealth aircraft were the silver-bullet F-117 and, prospectively, the strategic B-2. But with the F-22, stealth will soon move into one air force’s ordinary fighter squadrons.

How is a Su-27 supposed to fight an undetectable enemy that can stand off and lob Amraams at it? It can’t, no more than a Mustang could take on a MiG-15, and the only way to even up the fight is to match the technology and build a new fighter. Don’t expect a return to the 1950s, but if applying stealth to new aircraft gets cheaper, more air forces will feel they can afford it as well as desperately need it.

If the new aircraft has few improvements in other areas, it will be cheap to develop (like the Ching-Kuo) except for the costs related to signature reduction, enhancing the payoff and making it more rewarding to build a new aircraft. There is some evidence that the Usaf has taken this approach with the F-22, whose P&W F119 engines are assumed to be mere developments of the F-15’s F100s.

One last point. If stealth does not become cheap to apply, then it does not rescue us from the present inactivity of the combat aircraft industry. But if that happens, it also means the Usaf has bought itself a long-term monopoly on a huge combat advantage. And that again questions the wisdom of developing the Eurofighter 2000. Perhaps the Eurofighter partners would have been better off if they had accepted that the technology they had available did not justify a new aircraft. Surely they would have been better off buying F-22s from the US, whose technology did justify a new aircraft.