An Analysis of the Influence of Network Effects on Lifecycle Based Aircraft Technology Assessment

Abstract

Assessing the anticipated economic performance of a product is an important part in the development and decision making process. This is especially true for businesses operating in low-profit and high-cost environments such as airlines. Frameworks and tools that aid in this process typically focus on direct operating cost (DOC) or lifecycle cost (LCC) of a single aircraft. However, airlines rarely operate only one aircraft and to transfer the singular results to the complete fleet is not necessarily as simple as a multiplication. Therefore, the assessment framework LYFE (Lifecycle Cashflow Environment) developed by DLR had to be revised and modified in order to evaluate technologies on fleet level. This paper presents the new fleet assessment capability and demonstrates it on an assessment of Hybrid Laminar Flow Control (HLFC). For this study, HLFC was applied as a retrofit on the horizontal and vertical tailplane of Lufthansas A330 fleet during their D-check. The analyses comprise a fleet wide and time dependent fuel burn evaluation, average maintenance cost and overall economic feasibility. Combined with the LYFE inherent discrete event simulation, this modification enables the inclusion of network effects into detailed technology assessment.