Aircraft turnaround time estimation in early design phases: simulation tools development and application to the case of box-wing architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces SimBaD, a simulation tool for early-stage aircraft turnaround time estimation, validated on existing aircraft and applied to a novel box-wing design to compare its efficiency with conventional aircraft.

Contribution

Development and validation of SimBaD, a novel simulation tool for early aircraft turnaround time estimation, including its application to unconventional aircraft architectures.

Findings

SimBaD accurately predicts turnaround times using publicly available data.

Application to PrandtlPlane demonstrates impact of fuselage design on turnaround.

PrandtlPlane shows competitive turnaround time compared to conventional aircraft.

Abstract

This work deals with the problem of estimating the turnaround time in the early stages of aircraft design. The turnaround time has a significant impact in terms of marketability and value creation potential of an aircraft and, for this reason, it should be considered as an important driver of fuselage and cabin design decisions. Estimating the turnaround time during the early stages of aircraft design is therefore an essential task. This task becomes even more decisive when designers explore unconventional aircraft architectures or, in general, are still evaluating the fuselage design and its internal layout. In particular, it is of paramount importance to properly estimate the boarding and deboarding times, which contribute for up the 40% to the overall turnaround time. For this purpose, a tool, called SimBaD, has been developed and validated with publicly available data for existing aircraft of different classes. In order to demonstrate SimBaD capability of evaluating the influence of fuselage and cabin features on the turnaround time, its application to an unconventional box-wing aircraft architecture, known as PrandtlPlane, is presented as case study. Finally, considering standard scenarios provided by aircraft manufacturers, a comparison between the turnaround time of the PrandtlPlane and the turnaround time of a conventional competitor aircraft is presented.