High Speed Commercial Vehicle (HSCV) Technology Identification and Screening

To determine the future of aviation, work is ongoing to investigate the development of future High Speed Commercial Vehicle (HSCV) concepts. Due to the difficulties of designing and manufacturing a system to operate at more extreme speeds and altitudes than traditional commercial airplanes, one of the first steps is the exploration of technologies that will be necessary to make such a a system physically feasible and economically viable. Importantly, the initial phase of this seeks to find a method for comparing technologies at different levels of maturity, from specific processes all the way to broad ideas, to determine where funding should go to not only enable development in the short-term, but plan for the most environmentally friendly concepts decades into the future. This work describes the results of a workshop which identified a list of thirty-eight technologies, nine metrics with which to score these technologies, and the process followed to leverage expert elicitation to perform multi-attribute decision making to perform an initial prioritization and down-selection of technologies, which will then be further evaluated using modeling and other quantitative methods.