Passenger airplane manufacturing in the 20th century. Quantitative analysis

Abstract

The statistics on the production and development of passenger airplanes in the world is presented in this article for the first time. The methods for obtaining the results are described, uncertainties of the results are estimated. It is specified what exactly is considered to be a passenger airplane. It is shown that only 60,000 passenger airplanes were built during the entire 20th century. This is less than 3% of the total production of airplanes of all classes. Their total capacity amounts less than 5 million people, or less than a thousandth of the world’s population by the end of the last century. These 60,000 airplanes provided unprecedented mobility of the population. It was revealed that the leading role in the passenger airplane manufacturing belonged to the USA, the USSR took a steady second place. The ups-and-downs in airplane production are described, including the recessions during the Great Depression, World War II and the global economic decline (in the USSR, the USA and other countries) in the early 1960s, which was replaced by a rapid increase in output. It is indicated that the number of airplanes produced in the last third of the 20th century remained approximately constant, but their average capacity was growing rapidly, which largely ensured the explosive growth of air transportation during this period. The dynamics of the dead weight per one passenger is given. The dynamics of the number of the new passenger airplane models is presented. It is shown that for the last 30 years of the century their number was approximately constant, and almost all the models that reached the test stage were put into serial production. In the period between the world wars, however, about half of all models tested in flight remained prototypes. The change in the ratio of the number of airplanes by the number of engines is given. The renaissance of three-engine airplanes in the 1960s, the almost complete disappearance of singleengine passenger airplanes by the end of the century and the stable amount of a small proportion of four-engine airplanes for the last 30 years of the past century are noted.