2007-01-30 04:58:47 · 14 answers · asked by jonnyval2003 1 in Cars & Transportation ➔ Aircraft
Depends on the type of aircraft.
- Airbus A380 (until they ran into major problems and hit some cost penalties) was about 4 Billion Euros. The 4 Billion cost does not take into consideration the money invested by the development partners (part suppliers like Rolls Royce, GE, Goodrich...) outside of Airbus. If you considered all of that, you could probably double the total cost.
They were seriously working on the design since about 1995, so about 11 years to get certification. Selection of major suppliers and what I would call MAJOR work really started around 2000, so 6 years of MAJOR effort to get it designed and built.
It took THOUSANDS of people around the world (I was one of them) to bring this one to market. I wouldn't even try to guess how many people....5,000? 10,000?
- Bombardier CRJ-700 Regional Jet was relatively cheap and easy because it was based on their earlier CRJ-100 jet. If I remember right, it was about 2 Billion dollars (Canadian) of investment for Bombardier (plus suppliers' investments) and took something like 4 years of major effort to get it designed and built. Bombardier was probably working on the design for an additional 3 years before that.
Again, there were probably something like 5,000 people around the world making that project happen.
- It's much cheaper and faster to build an aircraft that is a derivative of an exiating aircraft. Cessna and Gulfstream are famous for this.
A business jet derivative (like a Cessna Citation class jet) takes a bit less than a billion and takes about 3 years of serious effort, plus another couple in the first conceptual design stages.
- Honda with their first jet has been working on it for about 20 years. 20 years on the engine, and about 10 on the aircraft so far and we're only now just getting started on construction.
A lot of the early design phase is taken up with marketing studies and tradeoff studies condicted with the airlines to figure out just what it is that the airlines want. It's worth it to spend a few extra years of development to make sure that when you spend a couple billion that you give them what they want!
For a typical program, you can split the effort into the following chunks:
- market studies (1 year)
- conceptual design (2 years)
- preliminary design (1 year)
- detailed design (1 year)
- test article manufacture (1 year)
- flight test and certification (1 years)
2007-01-31 16:22:39 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Very little in fact. It usually will depend on how complicated you want the design to be. I have designed and built aircraft in about 1.5 hours. Usually a fast design will start with existing materials. I built an airplane that looked like the space ships from the old Battle Star Galactic in less than 2 hours. I started with the fuselage design and attached a standard NACA published lowspeed airfoil out of styro and two EDF ducted fans (from www.aeromicro.com) and hardwired them to a 8.4Volt NIMH pack. Bammo I had a free-flying version of the Battle Star Galactic fighters. It flew for over 300' before an air current knocked it over (no dihedral).
Now on the other hand I have been working on a helo design for over 10 years that has yet to leave the drawing board (or Autocad). The complexity and effort is up to you as the designer.
2007-01-30 05:57:34 · answer #2 · answered by Drewpie 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
If I were given a plain sheet of paper, I could design, fold, and fly an aircraft in about 30 seconds. Some I design are better than others, but I have been known to get one all the way across the room on occasion.
2007-01-30 12:17:47 · answer #3 · answered by baron_von_party 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
It takes a lot of money, thinking and time to build an aircraft. In addiiton, size matters. If the aircraft is small, then not much. If the aircraft is widebody and you are thinking of putting new technology such as composite, aerodynamics and engines, you will need to make this. As a result, you will need lot of money for development. It took Airbus around 10 billion dollars to develop the a380.
2007-01-30 12:39:24 · answer #4 · answered by ADIB 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
These answers are true for the most part. It takes years of planning and evaluation to get an airplane off the ground.
On the other hand, there was a WWII - era fighter plane (I think it was the P-51) that went from initial concept to a prototype rolling off the assembly line in an insanely short period of time (like 120 days). Different times, different motivations.
2007-01-31 16:22:32 · answer #5 · answered by Bob G 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
For an ultralight you can buy the plans for couple of hundred dollars or less, depending on which model you want to build, and you can build it out of materials I'd say for around few thousand, but maybe cheaper. You can make an engine out of half a VW engine. It will take time & effort, extreme precision.
2007-01-30 13:22:05 · answer #6 · answered by christinedaae 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It depends upon what type of aircraft that you are looking to build. If you are looking into building a small homebuilt I would suggest that you visit the EAA website http://www.eaa.org/ they are an organization dedicated to home-builders.
2007-01-30 05:20:38 · answer #7 · answered by ? 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Boeing is going to spend 8 billion on there next plane the 787.
2007-01-30 14:29:55 · answer #8 · answered by tallbrian1000 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
commercial airplanes , or military need a really long period to , about 10 years for commercial and 20(or more) for military (I mean NEW kinds, for example superhornet did not take a long time because it was mainly a "zoom" of the hornet, but it took some years).
For homebuilds? it depends on you, on how complex is the project and how rafined is your project, how precise do you want the calculus to be...
2007-01-30 13:58:41 · answer #9 · answered by sparviero 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
What do you mean?Time or Money?
Well you need both..Time and money..Approximately 6-7years to build an airliner (commercial) that is approved by the authorities
2007-01-30 05:22:25 · answer #10 · answered by fre_flyer 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋