2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16
The global aircraft industry has experienced various fashion trends in its history. The designers of the twenties, thirties and forties of the last century competed in speed, ceiling, range and, of course, the size of their offspring.
The huge ANT-20, named after the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1934 became the largest aircraft of its time (with a conventional wheeled chassis). Its significance for air transportation was minimal, the airplane performed rather a propaganda function, with its majestic appearance evoking a sense of pride in the Soviet Stalinist aviation.
However, issues of prestige soon gave way to pragmatic considerations. Leading airlines have found that the more people a vehicle can carry, the cheaper it is to transport each individual passenger.
The path followed by the design bureau specialists under the leadership of A. N. Tupolev in the early 1960s, creating the largest passenger aircraft inin the world with the Tu-114 turboprop power plant, was typical of the Soviet aviation technical school. The Tu-95 strategic bomber was taken as the basis: the fuselage was expanded and equipped with three comfortable cabins. All design flaws were due to this conversion choice, the requirements for military equipment did not take into account the noise level and the convenience of climbing the ladder.
In the early 1970s, the American firm Boeing introduced the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the double-deck Jumbo Jet 747. It was a real masterpiece, the takeoff weight was just under 400 tons, some modifications provided for the possibility of carrying more than five hundred passengers.
However, not only passenger transportation was of interest to aircraft customers. In both the Soviet Union and the United States, defense ministries developed doctrines according to which the ability to quickly transfer large numbers of cargo was not the last place. The largest aircraft in the world, the Ruslan An-124, was originally designed to deliver missile systems, but is used for both commercial and humanitarian purposes. Its dimensions and technical characteristics, such as payload mass and flight range, remain unsurpassed to this day.
For all its merits, "Ruslan" has one feature - it is completely unsuitable for transporting people. Commensurate with its size, the largest passenger airliner Airbus A380 was created just for this purpose. Eight and a half hundred passengerslocated on two decks with unprecedented comfort, a non-stop range of up to 15 thousand km and a consumption of only three liters of kerosene per 100 km of track per passenger give this celestial titan an incomparable competitive advantage over its brothers in civil aviation plowing busy routes.
What will be the largest passenger aircraft in the world in the coming decades? What will it look like? Based on the general trends in the global aircraft industry, we can assume that we should expect a further increase in cabin capacity to a thousand or more seats, but the possibilities of classical layouts are not unlimited, so it will hardly exceed 1500. The design, obviously, will increasingly use composite materials and plastic. This conclusion can be drawn based on the data on the rapid development of polymer technologies, providing ever higher strength combined with lower weight.
But the question of who will create the next largest passenger aircraft in the world remains open. Europe has said its word, whose turn is it now? Maybe Americans or Russians? Is it possible that the next giant will be Chinese? The aviation industry of China has been developing rapidly in recent years…
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