Although the spirited performance leaps and bounds of previous decades had dwindled in the 1980s to a shuffle befitting an octogenarian, advances in avionics compensated by simplifying the pilots’ task and, through such innovations as ground-proximity warning systems, reducing the likelihood of crashes. Above all, the 1980s marked the ascendancy of electronics in aviation.
What was not immediately apparent to the eye, however, was the revolution that was taking place beneath the skins of familiar airplane shapes. Giant leaps had morphed into fancy footwork. New business jets, while undoubtedly ever more capable and with a few exceptions–such as the widebody Challenger and supercritical-wing Citation III of the late 1970s–were for the most part improvements on familiar hardware. With the 747, Concorde and SR-71, production airplanes had apparently got as big and fast as they ever would (at least until the 1989 surprise of Antonov’s six-engine behemoth, the 1.2-million-pound An-225). Whatever it was, opening the new edition of Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft, that hotly awaited annual catalog of the latest and greatest in aircraft design, somehow just didn’t hold the same sense of anticipation that it once did. Maybe it was a matter of butting up against the realities of aviation’s maturity, or maybe it was simply a product of the funk enveloping the west at the start of the 1980s. No offense intended to its participants, but aviation progress by the 1980s had become rather mundane by comparison with the incessant leaps and bounds of previous decades.
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