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The demanded development towards various emission reduction goals set up by several institutions forces the aerospace industry to think about new technologies and alternative aircraft configurations. With these alternative aircraft concepts, the landing gear layout is also affected. Turbofan engines with very high bypass ratios could increase the diameter of the nacelles extensively. In this case, mounting the engines above the wing could be a possible arrangement to avoid an exceedingly long landing gear. Thus, the landing gear could be shortened and eventually mounted at the fuselage instead of the wings. Other technologies such as high aspect ratio wings have an influence on the landing gear integration as well. To assess the difference, especially in weight, between the conventional landing gear configuration and alternative layouts a method is developed based on preliminary structural designs of the different aircraft components, namely landing gear, wing and fuselage.

Description of work-in-progress design candidates during the pre-concept and conceptual aircraft design stages have traditionally followed protocol compatible with the later, more mature phases of contemporary product development, i.e. preliminary and detailed design. Up to this moment in time there has been a natural, intuitive tendency to approach design description using geometry as the initial basis upon which all analysis and design refinement could proceed. Design and integration, whether kinematic or structural (static) systems, and irrespective of applications, should be treated as a holistic problem with functionality as opposed to geometric description of a physically tangible artifact being the first step in product definition. This paper presents a coherent, logical method of describing an aircraft concept using functionality as a basis.