“I want to walk into my office, set my coffee and donut down next to my workstation, and begin with a fresh screen. By lunch, I want to have an optimized configuration that we can send off to simulation, CFD, FEA and even wind tunnels in the afternoon.
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The Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program needs to meet urgent mission requirements, yet the program is pushing the boundaries of multidisciplinary aircraft design methods beyond traditional structure.
wants the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, but is committed to the B-21.
The Air Force has structured the CCA program for fast incremental development to build squadrons of aircraft needed to meet the missions. However, the industry must cooperate and adapt to deliver on these quick turnaround programs.
The “Big 3” aircraft suppliers, conditioned to have 20+ year development cycles and 40-year production lines, are not built for this agile program; small companies are.
The other side of the issue is that small, agile companies can build only a few aircraft in the development process. The Air Force needs the major companies to ramp up the production with their facilities and workforce.
The specific requirements for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) are not publicly available, and AVID does not have direct access to program details. However, the overarching goals, both stated and inferred, emphasize enhancing vehicle performance through extensive software-driven autonomy.
Modularity of systems and payloads is desired to reduce cost and improve maintenance efficiency.
Given that much of a modern aircraft’s cost is concentrated in its payloads and software, designing the airframe and engine as delivery systems for these capabilities has become a secondary focus of the leadership.
The first two awards have been made to Anduril and General Atomics. From my perspective, the Air Force seems to have selected them to gain field experience with higher levels of modularity and software. One likely goal is to develop an artificial intelligence “pilot” that can be integrated with every aircraft and upgraded like a new operating system. If that is the case, then the Big 3 should be ready with their best technology for the next iteration with the understanding that there will be modularity, and the Air Force is bringing its own pilot. Software is a dominant cost in every program and the cost/risk of new autonomy is going to expand that cost. As the Air Force works to balance program costs, it makes sense that they would treat autonomy independent of the aircraft.
This shift underscores the need for advanced design software, tools and processes that minimize risk, maintain necessary design margins, and meet all flight performance and survivability requirements—while keeping costs low. Traditional methods, which relied on basic rules of thumb and moving straight into drawings, no longer suffice.
Today’s demands call for a more precise, integrated approach to aircraft design to achieve optimal results in both performance and cost-effectiveness.
The increasing pace of technology development by our adversaries is forcing the Air Force to change the way it integrates updates. The integrated nature of combat aircraft means that some technologies can integrate through modular hardware and software, but some require an entire new aircraft. Building smaller and cheaper aircraft that can bring the new technology to battle can serve to increase the useful life of the larger and more expensive platforms. This means that the design cycle of the smaller platforms with the newer technology must be significantly shortened. Hence the quick increments.
The short length of time to perform an increment in CCA means that the entire design cycle must be compact and have the flexibility to accept data being generated in parallel with the design. There will be customer feedback loops and lessons learned loops that must influence the design, but not overwhelm the process. There will be another increment where some new things can be integrated. So, there must be clear decision processes to select the right features to implement in this increment and capture the features that will go into the next. The engineering process must drive these configuration selections and intuition should be minimized to create a data driven design. After more than 100 years of aircraft design, we can get these things done correctly.
AVID ACS has been applied to many “unoccupied” aircraft concepts. The multidisciplinary synthesis process that ACS brings to the table enables trade studies on missions, technology and configurations to help identify the preferred solution. The balance of propulsion, aerodynamics, structures and systems can be investigated in a highly productive approach. Over the past several years, our emphasis has gone from just adding in engineering equations to helping the user achieve better results and to gain more insight into the design as they build their models. Rapidly providing a more comprehensive view into how the various disciplines are interacting throughout the design process, especially in a highly interactive environment, makes the ACS results more meaningful to the designers and better explained during the decision makers.
The results of ACS can be augmented using AVID’s PAGE and APEX tools. PAGE enables a full geometric layout of the inboard profile of the aircraft at the conceptual level. This provides a fast mass properties model that can include the effects of varying the fuel load and the payloads. APEX builds out the full six degree of freedom aerodynamics and control model. Within a short span of time, everything required for a full flight simulation model can be ready, maneuverability and agility can be verified in the simulation environment.
The CCA program will require engineering responsiveness with small business agility. It is time to do our best to deliver it.