Advanced Aerodynamic Technologies for Future Green Regional Aircraft

Future Green Regional Aircraft (GRA) will operate over airports located in the neighborhood of densely populated areas, with high frequency of take off/landing events and, hence, strongly contribute to community noise and gaseous emissions. These issues currently limit further growth of traffic operated by regional airliners which, in the next future, will have to face even more stringent environmental normative worldwide and therefore re-designed to incorporate advanced active aerodynamic technologies. The new concept behind GRA is based on several mainstream technologies: airframe low-noise, aerodynamic load control and load alleviation. The paper deals with the technological readiness level assessment of the most promising technologies and overall integration in the new generation of GRA, as a highly optimized configuration able to meet requirements for FlighPath 2050.