A Performance-Based Approach to Assessing the Price of Future Civil Aircraft

At present development of advanced civil aircraft is one of the key priorities in Russia. To become commercially successful advanced civil aircraft should provide competitive lifecycle costs. Accordingly, it requires balancing operational expenses and consumer-acceptable pricing during an aircraft design phase. However, price evaluation of a prospective aircraft with the analog method or the income method can be challenging due to the lack of a direct analog or the impossibility of obtaining a reliable long-term forecast of air transportation tariffs for a horizon comparable to the development cycle of the object of assessment. To address this problem, this study proposes a methodology for estimating the price of future commercial transport aircraft, combining cost-based and analogy approaches. The price is calculated as the sum of a modern analog aircraft price and the discounted savings future aircraft operation, adjusted for projected amount of passenger traffic. New regression models of price dependence on technical parameters such as passenger capacity, range, thrust-to-weight ratio, maximum takeoff weights are used to estimate the analog aircraft price and an advanced aircraft operational costs. Additionally, the article describes the results of testing the proposed approach for estimating the price of a next-generation passenger aircraft.

mathematical modeling, aviation, operating costs, competitiveness, price, civil aircraft