What will be the next largest passenger aircraft in the world?

World aviation development has gone through its historyvarious fashionable currents. Designers of the twenties, thirties and forties of the last century competed in speed, ceiling, range and, of course, the size of their offspring.

The huge ANT-20, received the name of the greatproletarian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1934 became the largest aircraft of his time (with the usual wheeled chassis). Its importance for air travel was minimal, the airplane performed more agitational function, its majestic appearance causing a sense of pride in Soviet Stalinist aviation.

However, soon questions of prestige gave way to prioritypragmatic considerations. Leading airlines were convinced that the more people can accommodate a flying vehicle, the cheaper the transportation of each individual passenger.

The way in which CB experts went underthe leadership of AN Tupolev in the early 1960s, creating the largest passenger aircraft in the world with a Turbo-prop power plant Tu-114, was typical for the Soviet aviation school. Based on the strategic bomber Tu-95: the fuselage was expanded and equipped with three comfortable salons. All design flaws were caused by this conversion choice, the requirements for military equipment did not take into account the noise level and convenience of lifting along the ladder.

In the early seventies, an American firmBoeing introduced the world's largest passenger aircraft, a two-deck "Jambo Jet 747". It was a real masterpiece, the takeoff weight was just under 400 tons, some modifications provided for the possibility of transporting more than five hundred passengers.

However, not only passenger transportationwere of interest to customers of aircraft. Both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, the ministries of defense developed doctrines according to which the possibility of rapid transfer of a large number of cargoes was not the last. The largest aircraft in the world Ruslan An-124 was designed initially for the delivery of missile systems, but it is used both for commercial and humanitarian purposes. Its dimensions and technical characteristics, such as the payload weight and the range of the flight, remain unsurpassed until now.

With all its merits, Ruslan has onefeature - it is absolutely not adapted to transport people. The size of the largest passenger airliner Airbus A380 is designed just for this purpose. Eight and a half hundred passengers, located with unparalleled comfort on two decks, a non-stop range of up to 15,000 km and the consumption of just three liters of kerosene per 100 km of travel per passenger create this incomparable competitive advantage for the heavenly titan over its civil aviation counterparts, busy tracks.

What will be the largest passenger aircraft inworld in the coming decades? What will it look like? Based on the general trends of the world aircraft industry, we can assume that we should expect a further increase in the capacity of the salons to a thousand or more places, but the possibilities of the classic layout schemes are not unlimited, so it will hardly exceed the figure of 1500. The design will obviously increasingly use composite materials and plastic. This conclusion can be made on the basis of data on the rapid development of polymer technology, providing an increasingly high strength in combination with a lower weight.

But the question of who will create the next mosta large passenger plane in the world, remains open. Europe said its word, whose turn is it now? Maybe Americans or Russians? Is it possible that the next giant will be Chinese? The aviation industry of the Celestial Empire has been developing rapidly in recent years ...