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The Vectoria aircraft was designed last year by staff members and students from Linköping University in Sweden and is a fighter that is designed to play a role similar to the Saab JAS 39 Gripen. The design incorporates many new ideas in aircraft design including stealth and two-dimensional thrust vectoring capabilities. One of the aircraft's prime requirements was to utilise STOL whilst also maintaining a low radar signature and obtaining fighter performance. This in itself is no easy feat as to date no western aircraft has successfully combined these requirements, although these factors are being included in the different American JSF projects. The Vectoria was originally designed as a part of a structures project in which all the various components had to be fitted. It was decided that the aircraft should have two dimensional thrust vectoring in the form of a simple flap was the cheapest and most light form of achieving STOL performance and improved manoeuvre properties.

The design process is an interactive feedback process where the performance of the design is compared with the performance specification. In aircraft design it is very important that the system is optimised with respect to different aspects such as performance and weight. Traditionally, and by necessity, the design procedure has began with some kind of performance specification followed by a conceptual design, and after that the system has been optimised (usually implicitly) with respect to the performance specification. Typically, aircraft design optimisation is characterised by a multitude of objectives that can be difficult to compare to each other, such as low fuel consumption, high speed and passenger comfort. Usually this is where the engineering judgement of the designer comes in. In traditional design it is often difficult to establish what was the result of design decisions and what was the result of pure optimisation.

The design task for last year students in Aircraft Design at Linköping University was to design a manned solar powered aircraft. The mission was to survey the U.S./Mexican borderline in search for possible intruders. The Sunriser began as a sole paper project, but quite soon we felt a need to prove that solar powered flight really was feasible. Thus the decision was made to design and build a solar powered demonstrator of our own design. The demonstrator aircraft, a radio controlled model aircraft named “the Sunrazor”, was designed, built and flown with good result. This paper deals with the basic theory of sun powered flight and describes the basic thoughts and design considerations which finally led to the configurations chosen.

A well designed landing gear and a proper integration is of utmost importance for the success of any aircraft design. This should never be neglected but often is, especially in the conceptual design stage. This paper reflects the author’ s own experience in landing gear design on the Saab Gripen aircraft as well as experience gained on aircraft conceptual designs of later dates. The aim of the paper is to underline the importance of spending more time on landing gear design and integration in conceptual design. The paper reflects the importance of proper interaction between landing gear design and other disciplines and above all underlines the fact that landing gear design should be treated as an equally important design parameter, just as any other, in the final choice of aircraft configuration.