ABSTRACT
Composites with carbon and glass bers have been steadily gaining a very high-level of importance within the aerospace industry since the 1970s. Continued technology development of these materials brought a new revolution to the commercial aircraft industry including Airbus and Boeing to allow introduction of wide body aircraft to the world’s airline customers in the twenty-rst century. Worldwide research and development on composite materials and their manufacturing processes for producing aircraft components with these materials mitigated to some extent the increased cost of materials. Reduction of manufacturing costs helped the aircraft industry to introduce new fuel-efcient longrange aircraft. Research is continuing performing exercises for the reduction of the cost of manufacturing by developing new processes. Manufacturing processes from the very labor-intensive prepreg hand lay-up process to newer processes like automated tape laying and or automated ber placement have brought cost-efcient airframe composite structures to reality. Thermoplastic composites with their short manufacturing cycle time compared with thermoset composites have brought further improvement in manufacturing costs and thus increased usage of composites.
