Life-cycle costs and infrastructural investments induced by unconventional low-noise aircraft

The environment challenge and the expected growth of the market demand impose a technology breakthrough within the aeronautical industry. Although several innovative configurations of airplanes have been analyzed, none of them has been yet chosen as the most promising candidate. One of the reasons is related to the not yet known economic impacts of these architectures, since the life-cycle costs and infrastructural investments analysis are still unclear and therefore the current modules cannot be reliably directly applied. Such cost categories, in the last decades, have been mainly related to design and operational factors, as aircraft fuel-weight and empty-weight, with only an indirect link to the aircraft performance, particularly from the environmental viewpoint. This work presents a novel approach to include up-to-date models of life-cycle costs for low-noise aircraft from an airliner perspective. The situation is here addressed as a multidisciplinary conceptual design problem including the above up-to-date models. The possibility to estimate at the conceptual design stage the economic and financial implications of a radically new concept would substantially increase the possibility for the manufacturers to rank and select the most promising ideas.