iscover
The Lockheed F-22 is similar in overall configuration to the F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Hornet, MiG-29 and Su-27, but does introduce a new technology to fighter design, i.e. stealth. If introducing stealth technology into a new fighter aircraft becomes affordable we may yet see a range of new combat aircraft as other nations try and keep up with the US’s technological leap forward.
Essay – An Industry Runs out of Ideas
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An Industry Runs Out Of Ideas
The drought of new aircraft programmes is getting worse. Very few manufacturers are now planning to build new aircraft, either civil or military.
The 1992 edition of the Observer’s Book of Aircraft had just two entirely new types (compared with the previous year’s edition): the Yak-141 and the Eurofighter 2000 (and one of those has since been cancelled, while the other continues to struggle for funding). Everything else “new” in the latest edition of the pocket Jane’s was a mere derivative or version of an older aircraft.
Why is this happening? We usually blame the high cost of development, but the other side of the coin is that improvements do not produce much benefit these days. Building a new aircraft — and by this I mean a new airframe, not a mere update — is less cost-effective than it used to be. The underlying difficulty is that the aircraft industry is running out of ideas. It has become a mature industry, one that is no longer capable of maintaining the same rate of improvement it enjoyed as a child. This frequently happens in technology. Bursting into a new field, people quickly develop new ways of doing things. After a while, the easy ideas start to dry up (they have to, since they were easy) and further improvements become difficult.
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