ABSTRACT
Airplanes and motor vehicles have some similarities. The aircraft industry, commercial and military, was an early user of technical computing. Since the days of vector processors designers and developers would run fluid dynamics codes to simulate airflow and turbulence over the proposed frame of the aircraft. This chapter looks at the whole aircraft, and considers how computers assist in the design of a very crucial component: The jet engine. “The significant difference between crash simulation for the auto industry and jet turbine application is that the energy involved in aero events is significantly higher than that of the auto industry. James Ong, who is a technical specialist at Rolls-Royce USA, sees challenges that were introduced by the transition to parallelism over distributed memory systems. The chapter provides the story of the first commercial airplane that was designed completely electronically, using computer models, before the first prototype was ever built, belongs to Boeing.
