Huyssen, Reinhard JSpedding, GR2025-01-202025-01-202024-09http://hdl.handle.net/10204/13950The bulk of fossil fuel in aviation is consumed in the domain of fixed-wing subsonic flight. Environmental concerns put strong incentives on the industry to improve flight efficiency. Best flight efficiency can only be attained if an aircraft design is based on its ideal configuration. Already since the middle of the previous century, the industry became entrenched in the tube-and-wings configuration, here referred to as the Current Dominant Configuration (CDC). It is widely speculated that better arrangements of wings and bodies exist, and many research initiatives are dedicated to the exploration of alternatives. These are typically done for specific types of aircraft, mostly for the airline industry. Yet, new aircraft developments keep employing the CDC as if proposed alternatives are ignored. Here a hypothesis is tested which suggests that a single family of aircraft configurations exists which is ideal for the majority of economically significant flight objectives within this domain. To organise the aircraft design space into families of configurations, a hypothetical Ideal Wing is introduced as a common basis from which all configurations evolve by inflation to provide practical flyers with volume for their payload. While the most prominent configurations, including the CDC, appear to disqualify as candidates for the proposed ideal configuration, the one which qualifies, has not been seriously examined in human aviation, although it is familiar. Termed the Natural Dominant Configuration, as it appears in natural flyers, it certainly merits further exploration.FulltextenAircraft configurationsIdeal wingGull-wingInflation factorFlight objectiveConference Presentationn/a