Why do some airplane designs last for so long? It is because a successful replacement for a truly successful airplane is so very hard to contrive. Many airplanes are built. Many fly. Very few succeed remotely as well as just a few of them do. So, once you have your hands on one of these mega-hits, you tend to hang onto it tight. Many new and improved designs are proposed, which will supposedly do even better than your mega-hit airplane, but supposedly is most definitely not definitely, and it is best to stick with the angelic machine you know than bet everything on a replacement that will as likely as not fall diabolically short of its mark.You could say the same about car designs, or firearms. Lots are made, but very few become classics. Even today, with computer modeling and Computer Aided Design you still get a bunch of designs that, while functional, have clear shortcomings. The few designs that all come together stand out.
The people who designed the ugly little duckling, the Manchester, were the exact same people who later turned it into the swan that was the Lancaster. But this was not because a pack of incompetent airplane makers suddenly turned over a new leaf and became brilliant airplane makers. They were brilliant airplane makers all along, this being a big part of the reason why Air Officialdom went ahead with the Manchester. Air Officialdom was, if not confident, then at least entitled to hope that the Manchester’s early problems would in due course be sorted, by the brilliant people at Avro. The Manchester failed for the simplest of all reasons, which is that almost all airplanes do fail, compared to the few which do not, no matter how brilliant are the people designing and building them. And then, when the Manchester did succeed, by being turned into the Lancaster, Air Officialdom was vindicated. Those teething problems were sorted. Very dramatically indeed, and with a design so different and so radical that it involved a name change, but they were sorted.
Perhaps this simply describes the shape of a normal distribution curve.
Funny enough, before I read down to the end... in fact a few sentences into the quote I said out loud:
ReplyDeleteThat's because they follow a power law distribution... like pretty much everything else.
Something like a Pareto distribution.
Of then tens of thousands of production aircraft in the last 110 years; the top ten most manufactured aircraft in the world, in the years that they were operational, accounted for somewhere between 40% and 80% of all operational aircraft (depending on the year).
Pareto efficiency, begets Pareto distribution.