Re: [AMD] AA MD-80 tailcones

--- In airlinermodelling@yahoogroups.com, keith ryder <keith_ryder@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks Joe. But weren't MD-80's still a McDonnell Douglas product when the tailcone design was changed?
>
> Incredible figures for reduced fuel burn from such a simple change! Small ideas are often the best....!!

Greetings Keith,

If you Google MD-80 tailcone, you'll find plenty of places that discuss the 2 different styles. As far as fuel burn reduction, the newer one is a big improvement, but the figure of 3-5% reduction in drag sounded quite optimistic to me and I believe that it's more on the order of 1-1.5% at most, but still very much worth it to replace them.

The new tailcone came out in 1986, so American already had well over 100 MD-80s with the old pointed tailcone. Apparently, they were not overly concerned with the drag/fuel burn until around 2002 when the price of fuel was becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and Boeing had taken over MD in 1997 which meant they would now be buying any parts for the MD-80s from Boeing. Since there were so many airplanes to retrofit, it made sense to make them in house as Joe said. Until Joe said it, I had not realised that American had finally retrofitted the newer style tailcones fleetwide because they did not do it for so long, but a look through airliners.net shows that they have now done so.

One thing that I have heard from many different sources is that since anything with an MD name on it was NIH by Boeing's thinking, they have not supported those products very well because they would like those products to go away and be forgotten so that they can sell more IH products and gain a larger customer base, set sales records, etc.

Regards,
Jeff Jarvis, SDF

NIH=Not Invented Here
IH=Invented Here

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