Stuart Grey wrote:

Aircraft design seems to be an iterative process.....
Chicken and egg thing. For this reason, they use regression analysis
of existing working designs.

Correct. This is a good thing, if you know what you're doing, because
it lets you easily determine what a new airplane is going to look like,
weigh, etc. On the other hand, you never get breakthroughs by using
this method, since whatever you design will be very similar to what's
come before.

I have found, since I started working at Scaled last September, that we
use a mix of "do it just like that" and "don't do it anything like
that", depending upon need :-).

--
Marc J. Zeitlin
http://www.cozybuilders.org/
Copyright (c) 2006