ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the creation of an aircraft system at its very highest level. It is not the purpose of this chapter to present the step-by-step procedure for the sizing of an aircraft. For the aircraft, these steps are well-known, for example, in Corning (1977). Rather it is to show how these steps fit into the SE process so that the parameters can be understood in terms of the basic SE categories, namely, performance requirements, constraints, and trade-off parameters. We will also show how these parameters logically flow down to the lower levels of the aircraft hierarchy. In this chapter we will look at how performance requirements and constraints result in both a synthesized aircraft system and a synthesized aircraft at the top level. Of course, the determination of the requirements at all levels will require the implementation of the principle of holism discussed in Section 4.3 and Chapter 7.
