4 Technology Quarterly |Aviation The EconomistJune 1st 2019
21are making planes lighter and more comfortable to fly in. Better
engines are making them quieter and cheaper to run. And better
avionics are, despite exceptions of the sort seen so recently, mak-
ing them safer (see chart).
Those better avionics also point inexorably in one direction: to
a day when most aircraft will no longer require a pilot. Airlines and
their passengers and regulators may take a while to come to terms
with this, so it is likely that pilots will sit in cockpits long after they
are needed for anything other than the reassurance of the paying
public. But armed forces are embracing a pilotless future. Surveil-
lance and missile-carrying drones have been around for a couple
of decades. The 2020s will see robot military helicopters intro-
duced and pilotless fighter jets starting to emerge, even though
these jets will, at least to begin with, be parts of squadrons that
have a human leader in control. Cargo aircraft—military probably
and civilian possibly—will be robotised as well.
New technology is also extending the concept of civil aviation.
The idea of supersonic transport (sst) for civilians is back on the
cards, 16 years after Concorde’s last flight. Three firms in America,
in particular, have plausible designs for ssts, appropriate com-
mercial partnerships, and, they hope, sufficient money to get pro-
totypes flying over the next few years. And another old fantasy, fly-
ing cars, seems likely to become real in the next few years, as firms
both new and old rush to build electrically propelled one- and two-
seater aircraft of novel design. Some will act as remotely con-
trolled taxis. Some will be the suvs of the sky—piloted by their
owners over city traffic jams and winding country roads alike.They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
In these two areas, ssts and flying cars, change is happening that is
reminiscent of the glory days of aeronautics—the half-century
after 1903, the year that the Wright brothers made the first widely
recognised, heavier-than-air powered flight, at Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina. Flying cars especially, if they can be proved safe and
manageable by air-traffic-control systems, may change transport
networks almost as much as their ground-based brethren did a
century ago, by being able to avoid the congestion that the multi-
plication of those brethren has brought.
Conventional civil aviation is also growing fast. The number of
jet airliners flying may double by 2040 as people, particularly
those in Asia who do not fly now, get richer. That will bring envi-
ronmental problems, for aviation is the least tractable of indus-
tries to decarbonisation in order to reduce greenhouse-gas emis-
sions. Aviation fuel packs more energy per kilogram than batteries
do. And, so far, attempts to make such fuel synthetically, rather
than from petroleum, have foundered on cost. The embrace of, or
resistance to, the growth of aviation may depend on whether that,
too, can change. 7Safer
Global passenger flights, fatalities per million flights*Source: Aviation Safety Network *Aircraft with more than 14 passengers1977 80 85 90 95 2000 05 10 15 17012345T
hea350 is a twin-engined airliner that is the top of the range of
Airbus’s offerings, rolling out of the company’s factory in Tou-
louse, France, at the rate of ten a month. Each of the finished planes
sits at the apex of a system of supply chains which fans out across
the world, bringing 3.5m components together into a single pro-
duct. An a350’s airframe is composed of seven sections. Three are
assembled into the fuselage, two being made at another site in
France and the third in Germany. The two wings are made in Brit-
ain, then transferred to Germany to be finished. The tail fin and the
horizontal-stabiliser assembly are made in Spain.
All of these pieces are flown to Toulouse in special transport
aircraft called Belugas—after the whale, which they resemble,
rather than the sturgeon, which they do not. They are made, most-
ly, of carbon-fibre-reinforced plastics (cfrps). These are compos-
ite materials that cannot be riveted in the way metal is because of
the damage this causes to the fibres. They are therefore held to-
gether by lock-bolts inserted through 10,000 specially drilled
holes in the flanges where the sections overlap.
Connecting the sections involves fitting them together, drilling
the holes (a process less damaging than riveting), unfitting them,
cleaning the holes and surrounding areas of debris, applying a
sealant to the flanges, fitting the pieces back together again and
then inserting the lock-bolts. At this point the myriad cables which
keep a modern aircraft flying, and which have been pre-fitted into
the airframe sections, are linked up.
Before their final bonding, however, the fuselage sections have
had what are known as “monuments” installed. These are bits of
equipment—galleys, crews’ quarters and so on—that would be too
big to carry through the cabin doors later. Afterwards, the rest of
the fitting-out is done, the plane is painted in the customer’s livery
and the crucial finishing touches, a pair of engines, one under each
wing, are added. The whole process takes about a month.
Airbus and its American counterpart Boeing dominate civil avi-
ation and have done so for decades. Airbus was formed in 2000,
though it acquired its current name only in 2014, having previous-
ly been known as eads. Boeing took over McDonnell Douglas, its
last American rival in the civil-aviation business, in 1997.
That domination has been enhanced yet further by Airbus’s re-
cent absorption of part of the business of Bombardier, a Canadian
company, and Boeing’s purchase of a large chunk of Embraer, a
Brazilian one. These two were the last firms in the West with even a
nominal claim to be independent makers of airliners. A Chinese
rival, comac, may eventually muscle in. And, in the wreckage that
was once the Soviet Union, the United Aircraft Corporation, a
merger of Soviet-era firms, clings to life. But, to all intents and pur-
poses, making airliners is at the moment a duopoly.Dirty tricks
The cockeyed nature of Airbus’s supply chain, spread across much
of western Europe, might be seen as a consequence of the firm’s
multinational antecedence and a desire not to put noses out of
joint by politically awkward closures of peripheral plants. But Boe-
ing is no better. The supply chain for its 787 Dreamliner, a compet-
itor of the a350, is even more convoluted than for the a350s, as a re-
sult of a decision early in the plane’s history to outsource
manufacturing of airframe sections to other firms. Despite such
self-indulgences, however, competition between the two firms isSome assembly required
Composites and electronic twins are transforming constructionManufacturing