The world aircraft industry has experienced various fashion trends throughout its history. The 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, named after the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1934 became the largest aircraft of its time (with an ordinary wheeled landing gear). Its significance for air transportation was minimal, the airplane performed an agitational function rather, evoking a sense of pride in Soviet Stalinist aviation with its magnificent appearance.
Soon, however, questions of prestige gave way to pragmatic considerations. Leading airlines have made sure that the more people a flying vehicle can accommodate, the cheaper it will cost to transport each individual passenger.
The path taken by the design bureau specialists under the direction of A.N. Tupolev in the early 1960s, creating the largest passenger aircraft in the world with a Tu-114 turboprop power plant, was typical of the Soviet aviation technical school. The strategic bomber Tu-95 was taken as the basis: the fuselage was expanded and equipped with three comfortable salons. All design flaws were due to this conversion choice, the requirements for military equipment did not take into account the noise level and the convenience of climbing the ramp.
In the early seventies, the American company Boeing introduced the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the double-decker Jumbo Jet-747. It was a real masterpiece, takeoff weight was a little less than 400 tons, some modifications provided for the possibility of transporting more than five hundred passengers.
However, not only passenger transportation was of interest to customers of aircraft. Both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the ministries of defense developed doctrines according to which the possibility of quickly transporting a large number of cargoes was not the last. The largest aircraft in the world, the Ruslan An-124, was originally designed for the delivery of missile systems, but is used both for commercial and humanitarian purposes. Its dimensions and technical characteristics, such as the mass of the payload and the flight range, remain unsurpassed today.
For all its merits, Ruslan has one peculiarity - it is completely unsuitable for transporting people. The largest passenger airliner Airbus A380 , comparable in size to it, was created just for this purpose. Eight and a half hundred passengers, who have previously enjoyed unprecedented comfort on two decks, a non-stop range of up to 15 thousand kilometers and a consumption of only three liters of kerosene per 100 kilometers per passenger create this heavenly titanium incomparable competitive advantages over its civil aviation counterparts, plowing Busy tracks.
What will be the largest passenger plane in the world in decades to come? What will he look like? Based on the general trends of the global aircraft industry, we can assume that we should expect a further increase in the cabin capacity to a thousand or more seats, but the possibilities of the classic layout schemes are not unlimited, so it is unlikely to exceed the figure of 1500. Composite materials and, obviously, will be increasingly used in the design plastic. This conclusion can be made on the basis of data on the rapid development of polymer technologies that provide ever higher strength combined with lower weight.
But the question of who will create the next largest passenger plane in the world remains open. Europe said its word, whose turn is now? Maybe Americans or Russians? Is it possible that the next giant will be Chinese? China's aviation industry has been booming in recent years ...