ABSTRACT

The commercial aircraft industry throughout the world is evolving to a small group of large companies. The development of new aircraft allows Systems Engineering (SE) to be applied in a blank slate fashion: that is, to start from the inception of the requirements for an aircraft and the development of initial concepts. A derivative aircraft utilizes major components of existing aircraft as the basis for the development of an aircraft which meets some new requirements. A change-based aircraft is an aircraft for a specific customer which may have a large number of requested changes. A key SE principle is that commercial aircraft should be considered as a whole and not as a collection of parts which can be independently developed and integrated. The fact that the Air Transport Association has adopted this hierarchical view of the aircraft shows that the SE concept of an abstract hierarchy is already an accepted concept in the aircraft industry.