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. 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. 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. 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).
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. Giant leaps had morphed into fancy footwork.
