General Aviation Airplane Design Tools for PC's

DARcorporation is developing an interactive, user-friendly computer program to perform preliminary design and analysis functions for fixed wing general aviation airplanes. The system allows design engineers to rapidly evolve an aircraft configuration from weight sizing through detailed performance calculations, while working within regulatory constraints. This paper shows the main features of the newly developed user interface for general aviation airplane design in a windows based environment. The ease of use will bring computer aided design methods to people previously not exposed to these methods because of the high amount of difficult computer knowledge needed.