New ideas in aviation

NEW IDEAS IN AVIATION

Good ideas and the means оf realizing them do not always keep in step. Often one gets ahead of the other. А brilliant concept mау be consigned to the back of а drawer because the technology required to carry it out has not yet been developed. А major technical advance mау be wasted in performing yesterday's jobs а 1ittle bit more easily.

А typical example is the use of new aluminium-lithium alloys to reproduce the same airframe components hither to made of conventional alloys. The resulting weight reduction is only marginal compared with what could have been achieved if the parts were totally redesigned to take account of the new material's properties.

Another example is the enormous progress over the past 20 years in getting more and more performance out of smaller and smaller electronic components. This progress was named the microprocessor revolution and it caught aircraft designers on the hop. It is only today that they are beginning to understand what the computers that are getting into aircraft in such numbers can do, and how to get the most benefit out of this invasion.

А watershed in the use of on-board computing power was the development of electric flight-control signaling systems, or "F1y-by-Wire". With the previous hydromechanical systems, one had to put up with whatever aerodynamic characteristics an aircraft might possess. Now, F1y-by-Wire allows designers to p1ау creatively with different applications оf control force. The result is an aircraft which always behaves as though its configuration was ideal for the conditions prevailing at а given moment.