What Piano is and does: Piano is an integrated tool for analysing and comparing existing or projected commercial aircraft. It generates fast, accurate, industrial-quality evaluations (even on a laptop) covering geometry, mass, aerodynamics, flight performance and other aspects.
Piano benefits from more than fifteen years of software development expertise, methodology evolution and customer feedback. It is backed up by a long-term commitment and is widely used by many prestigious Aerospace organisations.
It is applicable to conventional commercial subsonic aircraft ranging in size from small business jets to the largest airliners currently envisaged.
It includes a large and continually updated database of more than 250 aircraft, calibrated with the best available data collected over many years.
Piano can be used to generate new conceptual designs through single-point or 'family' analysis, multi-variable numerical optimization, or parametric sensitivity studies.
Projected and existing aircraft are compared impartially within a single environment using consistent standards.
Aircraft models can be adjusted in many ways to match known specifications or claimed performance levels.
Piano can execute detailed flight performance calculations. Off-design missions and time/distance/altitude/fuel data rarely quoted in brochures can be evaluated easily.
Piano is a highly interactive and intuitive package. The analyst is fully in charge at all times.
Extra utilities (airports database, airspeed conversions etc) constitute a designer's everyday toolkit.
What Piano is not, and does not do: Piano is not a substitute for professional experience. Rather, it boosts productivity and awareness by providing a flexible and independent means of analysis or verification. It does not replace inventiveness or judgement, but is a servant to these qualities.
Piano is a tool. It cannot eliminate basic conceptual limitations of aircraft project analysis, or provide 'magic' solutions. The aim is to provide fast and accurate data, not to dictate a direction to the user.
It is primarily aimed at conventional, commercial, subsonic aircraft certificated to civil standards. It is not suitable for military, supersonic or unconventional (e.g. canard, multisurface, or blended body) configurations.
Piano utilises preliminary design methodologies that cannot answer detailed design questions such as those involving individual component stressing or dynamic control aspects.
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