Willy Messerschmitt’s most notable impact on aviation history occurred during the wartime period 50 years ago. While there is a general belief that the business approach under the extraordinary circumstances of this period is in no way relevant to today’s business environment, this paper will, nevertheless, attempt to illustrate that some elements of Messerschmitt’s approach may still be worthy of consideration.

Messerschmitt’s approach had not been that of “big business” but rather comparable to that of an artist-craftsman. Since the approach of an artist is best reflected by reviewing his “oeuvre”, this paper will be proceeding accordingly. Figure 1 shows Messerschmitt in 1935.

The experimental results of a parallel Blade-Vortex Interaction (BVI) study are presented. The quality of all pressure data reflects improvements in the Glasgow University BVI facility and in the method of reducing and presenting data. Pressure histories clearly track the passage of a vortex-associated disturbance across the aerofoil. Tracking this disturbance permits an examination of vortex convection velocities, and also allows for a correlation between vortex trailing edge passage and force and moment perturbations.

The development of the European spaceplane Hermes is based on new technologies under investigation. These technologies remain valid to the European aerospace database whatever the political future of the programme. Results achieved have been continuously implemented in the design process, which allowed the consolidation of the baseline configuration. Major technologies within the programme comprise re-entry Computational Fluid Dynamics and hypersonic Experimental Fluid Dynamics, the hot structure, thermal protection and material development, and development of new subsystem technologies for manned spaceflight.

A summary of the technology results achieved during the pre-design phase is made and implementation into the consolidated pre-design configuration is shown.

The next challenge for future engines is to increase the bypass ratio in order to improve the propulsive efficiency. These very high bypass ratio engines improve the fuel consumption but create new technical challenges. These challenges include the fact that larger engines require bigger nacelles, hence the external drag and weight increase; furthermore the installation of these engines on civil aircraft is more challenging. Therefore important work has been carried out to optimise the design of these new nacelles and their installation on the airframe.

The present work is based on a new engine, with a very high bypass ratio. For this engine Snecma has designed an advanced nacelle with a low diameter-low length fan cowl and a core cowl mounted thrust reverser. A very short secondary flow nozzle is required to improve accessibility to the core engine and its accessories. The fan cowl length is dramatically reduced.

Different solutions were investigated to design the inlet and the fan cowl. Based on 2D potential inverse codes and 3D Euler codes, CFD calculations were made to optimise the aerodynamic lines for cruise conditions while keeping good off-design performance. A highly challenging exhaust nozzle was designed to maintain good efficiency with very tough geometric constraints. For this Snecma used 2D Navier-Stokes CFD codes. New reverse systems were studied for this type of nacelle, for example core cowl mounted thrust reversers. The optimisation of these highly 3D geometries was performed using 2D and 3D Navier-Stokes calculations.