In the last thirty years aircraft performance has experienced diminishing returns in terms of efficiency, on the order of 1% reduction in fuel consumption annually since 2010. Meanwhile, according to projections by Airbus and Boeing, air passenger traffic is expected to increase 3.5-4.6% per annum. ICAO has recommended that overall energy efficiency be improved by 2% annually. The rate of increase in demand and decrease in fuel consumption, raises the question of how this goal can be met.In this paper, engine technology advances are identified as the most significant contributing trend to aircraft performance. These trends are extrapolated in order to analyze the conditions that could lead to a potential break in the dominant aircraft architecture. A hybrid analytical-empirical model for aircraft optimization is used to predict the effects of these technological trends on aircraft design. Four technology scenarios are used to analyze the expected performance increase and expected year of break in architecture, for existing airframes and unconstrained airframe geometry.It is found that for existing airframes performance is expected to increase by 6-38% * Graduate Student Researcher, System Architecture Lab, Room 33-409, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

The volume of passenger air travel has increased rapidly since the first commercially viable passenger aircraft, the DC-3. Over this period, commercial aircraft increasingly appear to have consolidated around a dominant architecture. That is to say, aircraft designers have increasingly made the same architectural decisions (categorical choices such as high wing or low wing), while realizing performance gains in component technologies rather than from major architectural innovations. To quantify the assertion that a dominant architecture has emerged, we analyzed architectural decisions over time, finding a decrease in variation of these decisions in a data set of 157 historical aircraft architectures. We define an architectural performance metric based on passenger-carrying efficiency, technical performance, and market value, observing that in parallel with architectural consolidation, there has been a twofold increase in average performance since the inception of the DC-3. However, the performance trend is shown to follow a trajectory similar to that of a technology S-curve, implying that current improvements in performance with this dominant architecture may be reaching the stage of diminishing returns. Given current levels of activity in engine technology

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