Comment by potato3732842
3 months ago
> in which case, why have the tail engine at all?
"you know what this motorized piece of anything needs, less power"
-nobody, ever
3 months ago
> in which case, why have the tail engine at all?
"you know what this motorized piece of anything needs, less power"
-nobody, ever
You know you can just make the wing engines 50% more powerful, right?
No, you really can't. Even if it were the same size a dramatically more powerful engine would need a larger "tail" to maintain control in case of an engine out scenario. But a 50% more powerful engine is also likely to be much bigger meaning that major components like the landing gear (and everything around them). A 50% more powerful engine is also likely to be much heavier necessitating its support structures (a.k.a. the wing or tail) be redesigned.
The 737 MAX suffered a number of bad design decisions to accommodate its newer, more powerful engines. Its engines topped out at about 8% more powerful than the 737 NG engines.
It wasn’t about the engines being powerful but about the fan being bigger and therefore more efficient
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> just make the wing engines 50% more powerful
You realize this is not quite how aerospace engineering works, right?
Look at thrust on the 737 Max vs thrust on the original 737.
There's a lot of other changes, of course, but more powerful wing engines let you build a bigger plane in the same kind of shape. Changes in flight rules are also significant; if twin jets can't serve all your routes, you most likely want trijets to cover the routes that can't be served by twins and don't demand a quad ... with current flight rules and current engines, twin engine covers pretty much everything.
Essentially every new design is a twinjet, so it's clearly possible to make appropriate decisions in that design space. And both Boeing and Airbus have given up on quadjets.
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