If this helps any, the 757 was the result of the availability of new engine designs. Engines affect everything, and one thing led to another, and Boeing decided it was worthwhile to design a new wing, and a new wing led to a new fuselage, and pretty much a ground up design.
Airplanes just do not have interchangeable designs.
Boeing tried to save money by sharing parts between the 757 and 767, but this didn't work out very well. The designs were just different enough that the 767 engineering group had essentially nothing to do with the 757 engineering group, I don't remember even meeting my counterpart there.
The assembly lines were in different plants and completely independent, the tooling was all custom designed/built and so different, the testing/certification process was all different, and on and on.
And besides, a design study is mostly an outline that survived enough wind tunnel testing that one knows what the performance would be.
When I joined the 757 team, we started with a hole we were allocated that the machinery had to fit in. It's true that there's a family resemblance among Boeing designs, because they like to continue with what works. Design studies, though, are not proven designs.
> legal lawsuits
That is common among all highly competitive industries, whether they have merit or not. There's certainly enough of that going on in the tech sector.
Airplanes just do not have interchangeable designs.
Boeing tried to save money by sharing parts between the 757 and 767, but this didn't work out very well. The designs were just different enough that the 767 engineering group had essentially nothing to do with the 757 engineering group, I don't remember even meeting my counterpart there.
The assembly lines were in different plants and completely independent, the tooling was all custom designed/built and so different, the testing/certification process was all different, and on and on.
And besides, a design study is mostly an outline that survived enough wind tunnel testing that one knows what the performance would be.
When I joined the 757 team, we started with a hole we were allocated that the machinery had to fit in. It's true that there's a family resemblance among Boeing designs, because they like to continue with what works. Design studies, though, are not proven designs.
> legal lawsuits
That is common among all highly competitive industries, whether they have merit or not. There's certainly enough of that going on in the tech sector.