It has been all over the trade press recently. 10 billion extra euros to go into French aeronautics research, the money coming from a planned public bond issue. Some of the fruits of this dough will come in the form of ground and flight demonstrations in the 2011-2014 time-frame and the primary aim of the effort is to meet the threat to Europe’s lead in the narrow-body aircraft area. Those new Chinese and Russian (not to mention Canadian) designs are being taken seriously and for good reason. Replacements for the A320 family and of course the 737 will be needed and probably sooner than later if Europe and the US wants to remain big players.
The line-up of planned demos is impressive. Replacing hydraulics with electrics, 15 % improvement in the performance of existing turbofan technologies, improved rotorcraft, and blended winglets… Airframes with nanostructure enhanced materials and intelligent skin and even new cockpits to mate up with SESAR and NextGen are also on the Agenda. All very good and timely.
Of course we have our very own research program, SESAR. There are also very striking similarities between the agenda items… 15 % engine performance enhancement with existing technologies or blended winglets are in the same league as the early phases of SESAR which also aim (very correctly) to extract the last possible drop of performance from what we already have before turning to more exotic things.
Matters start to diverge however when we get into the realms of nanotechnology materials and intelligent skins… Not that the SESAR concept of operations did not contain their air traffic management equivalents but the resulting Master Plan seems to have pushed them to a horizon that is a good deal further down the road than intelligent skins seem to be.
We all know that there is only one thing certain about deadlines… they are likely to be missed. The reasons for this are many but setting ambitious dates can counter, to a certain extent, this apparent inevitability. This is where our Master Plan takes second place to what is being planned for the rest of the aeronautics industry in France.
It is not true that ATM research is so much more difficult than materials research. The difference is in the organizations and interests that drive them.
Air traffic management needs to be a bit more ambitious in its planning to get our equivalent of nanotechnology on board by the time it will really be needed.