Messier-Dowty is reporting progress in its ‘Silence' study to produce quieter landing gear. At the show, it revealed that practical solutions for add-on fairings on Airbus A340 landing gear have been designed for the nose, main and centre landing gear.
The Silence consortium, co-ordinated by Messier-Dowty parent Snecma, has 51 partners representing 16 countries and was announced at last year's Paris Air Show. Landing gear can account for up to 25% of the external noise generated from an aircraft on approach.
Messier-Dowty's tasks within the European Union-supported project are to build on existing work in the area to design and make noise-reducing fairings for flight test evaluation, and to investigate alternative landing gear configurations using noise reduction as a design driver.
Manufacture of the final solutions will start later this year and fitted to a test rig at Airbus UK for retraction tests. Following this the low noise fairings will be fitted to the test A340. Flights to compare flypast noise between that of the gear with the fairings and those without should be carried out later in 2003.
Source: Flight Daily News
