This article was nominated for deletion on 10 November 2010 (UTC). The result of the discussion was Hopelessly compromised. I really fail to see how any admin can find any useful consensus from a discussion which has been so completely railroaded by a page move that for 5 days we have been discussing a different article. .
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Ok, now that a rescue effort is underway... Let's put this into context.
I'm going to get involved, this subject is of interest to me and I've got most of the professional education for the field (I work in closely related aerospace engineering part time, but only design aircraft as a part-time hobby).
I am an aviation enthusiast rather than a professional but have a good scientific education and so have had no difficulty working with any of the sources that I've cited so far. There are some jibes in the AFD that my understanding and writing upon the topic is poor but no examples have been provided. What do you make of the current draft?
Our goal ought to be FA status as this is a topic which ought to be done well. The main difficulty is likely to be keeping a good balance between the numerous aspects of this topic and avoiding edit wars and conflicts. To minimise trouble, we should try to agree an outline for the topic. The chapter headings used in the books written about this should be a good base our section headings and I'll list some examples here for comment.
Another difficulty will be matters of style - American vs British English, citation style, units of measure, etc. Again, it would be good to get agreement on this at the outset.
More importantly, I think you need to decide what the actual topic of the article is. The first sentence of the lead doesn't help us much. Is the article just about the different design elements of an aircraft? Because if that's the topic it could be better served in Fixed-wing aircraft or Rotorcraft, with the details coming in the specific "design element" articles.
If you think the topic of the article is about the design process -- conceptual design to detailed design to manufactuering to testing to operations/support, then the proper article for that is Aircraft design process. (and I won't say any more about my opinions on that to avoid derailing this discussion)
If you think the article is about specific designers, well, I think there's another place for that.
Anyway, you need to decide what the scope of the article will be, and get consensus, before diving into serious writing. For example, right now there is a completly random "weight budget" section -- that doesn't fit into any context with the rest of the article at the moment... things like that will have to be addressed. -SidewinderX (talk) 12:52, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
SidewinderX queries the weight budget section. It may help to explain this as an example of the work so far. In writing the article from scratch, I wanted to lay down some good sources to establish the notability of the topic with a good variety, so that the material could not be criticised as depending upon a single source. This was defensive writing, driven by the exigencies of AFD. Now that is closed, we might proceed in a more deliberate way, but it seems good to sample from a variety of sources to get a feel for them and their content.
My preferred sources were books with the title Aircraft design as these most obviously address the topic. Some of these can be previewed on Google books and so they provide good, accessible support for what is said. One of these discussed the importance of weight in a design and I summarised this. I planned to develop the point by saying something about the way that aircraft tend to exceed their designed weight budget, due to feature creep and the like. But I didn't want to say anything that was not based upon a good source because that is usually criticised as OR.
So, that explain the origin of this section. As we flesh out the article, this might become part of a larger section about design parameters and specifications. I agree that it would be best to now prepare a good outline or framework for further work so that a disjointed appearance is avoided.
(ec) Ok, I understand that, but the weight budget comment was in reference to a larger point -- you need to define the scope of the article. Like any phrase "aircraft design" has a hundred different meanings. Every book that that uses the phrase "aircraft design" in the title isn't about the same topic. Is this article meant to be a laundry list of things considered while designing an aircraft? Without a topic and scope you can't end up with a logical, useful, and managable article. Cited sentences don't make an encyclopedia article, you need focus. Solve that problem first. -SidewinderX (talk) 14:50, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, there is no consensus for this. This section is a discussion of our coverage of weight budgets and discussion of dab and the like is tangential to this. Colonel Warden (talk) 14:41, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong - there has been a proposal here for over a week, you didn't respond indicating that you did not object. If you want to propose something else to try to establish a new consensus, then feel free. - Ahunt (talk) 14:48, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A DAB page is the best solution at the moment. I offered to scope and rewrite the original article that was brought to AfD but that was effectively rejected. As Ahunt notes the term 'aircraft design' does mean different things depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on, it only means the process of designing an aircraft in the UK. I am often at odds with the content of 'Design and development' sections of aircraft articles (which is an agreed project standard header that I use when creating aircraft articles) because the 'design' part usually talks about layout, features and systems etc. where to me it should mean 'how was it designed, who designed it and where was it designed?', I realise that this is an American difference and respect it.
We have no equivalent term in the UK for the way that 'Aircraft design' is trying to be used, nearest I could say is 'Aircraft configuration' or 'Technical description', I have used the second term as a level three section header in articles but got reverted, to me it is crystal clear what that header means. In the same way any article titles related to the topic of designing aircraft should also be crystal clear as to what the scope is, this helps editors enormously when adding relevant content (or removing irrelevant content). To move forward the topic needs to be discussed at WT:AIR where knowledgeable aviation article editors can thrash it out to a logical solution. I've seen fantastic improvements in aviation articles in the three years that I've been involved with the project and finding a solution to this particular area of coverage will not be far away (remembering that there is no deadline). Nimbus(Cumulus nimbus floats by)01:04, 26 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
