What will be the next largest passenger aircraft in the world?

The world aviation industry has experienced various fashionable trends in its history. 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, received the name of the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1934 became the largest aircraft of its time (with the usual wheeled chassis). Its importance for air travel was minimal, the airplane performed more agitational function, its majestic appearance causing a sense of pride in Soviet Stalin aviation.

However, soon questions of prestige gave way to pragmatic considerations. Leading airlines were convinced that the more people can accommodate a flying vehicle, the cheaper the transportation of each individual passenger.

The way the specialists of the Design Bureau led by A. N. Tupolev in the early 1960s, creating the largest passenger aircraft in the world with a Turbo-propeller power plant Tu-114, was typical for the Soviet aviation technical school. The basis was taken by the strategic Tu-95 bomber: 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 convenience of lifting on the ladder.

In the early seventies, the American firm Boeing introduced the world's largest passenger aircraft, a two-deck "Jambo Jet 747". It was a real masterpiece, takeoff weight was just under 400 tons, some modifications provided for the possibility of transporting more than five hundred passengers.

However, not only passenger transportation was of interest to aircraft customers. Both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, the ministries of defense developed doctrines according to which the possibility of rapid transfer of a large number of cargoes did not take the last place. The largest aircraft in the world Ruslan An-124 was designed initially for the delivery of missile systems, but it is used both for commercial and humanitarian purposes. Its dimensions and technical characteristics, such as the payload weight and the range of the flight, remain unsurpassed until now.

With all its merits, Ruslan has one peculiarity - it is absolutely not adapted to transport people. The size of the largest passenger airliner Airbus A380 is designed just for this purpose. Eight and a half hundred passengers, located with unprecedented comfort on two decks, a non-stop range of up to 15 thousand km and the consumption of just three liters of kerosene per 100 km of travel per passenger create this incomparable competitive advantage for the heavenly titan before its civil aviation counterparts, Busy tracks.

What will be the largest passenger aircraft in the world in the coming decades? What will it look like? Based on the general trends of the world aircraft industry, we can assume that we should expect a further increase in the capacity of the salons to a thousand or more places, but the possibilities of the classic layout schemes are not unlimited, so it will hardly exceed the figure of 1500. The design will obviously increasingly use composite materials and plastic. This conclusion can be made on the basis of data on the rapid development of polymer technology, providing an increasingly high strength in combination with a lower weight.

But the question of who will create the next largest passenger aircraft in the world remains open. Europe said its word, whose turn is it now? Maybe Americans or Russians? Is it possible that the next giant will be Chinese? The aviation industry of the Middle Kingdom has been developing rapidly in recent years ...