Abstract:
The aviation industry is dominated by the domain of heavier-than-air, fixed-wing, subsonic
flight, and central to any design in this domain is the wing itself. One of the earliest debates in
aviation still centres around the usefulness of the wing volume. On the one hand it is held that
the wing, as an inevitable necessity, should provide the volume also for the payload. On the
other, it is argued that more efficient wings do not even have sufficient volume for the entire
wing structure. This work proposes precise definitions of the Wing Density and the Inflation
Factor, two parameters that can quantitatively reflect the economic and technological trends
in aviation. The wing volume of a hypothetical Ideal Wing is derived from the Operational
Parameters of any given Flight Objective and compared to the volume requirement of that
flight objective. We conclude that the dominant aircraft configuration of the future is likely to
remain within the same family of the current dominant configuration, in conflict with some
older predictions.
