There is a fascinating "cultural" titbit buried in this article (linked to by Transport Blog In Brief section - April 28th) about the battle between Boeing and Airbus for the aircraft market. I'm sure others have spotted this months ago, but I've only just realised what is going on here.

Styling has finally hit aircraft design:

… The Dreamliner will be the first airliner with a fuselage made entirely of lightweight carbon fibre and plastic instead of aluminium, allowing the aircraft to burn 20 per cent less fuel than similar aircraft.
Its windows are 30 per cent bigger and "electrically dimmable", meaning the view does not have to be blocked by lowering the blinds. It will also look different from other aircraft, with a pointed nose and a swept tailfin.

So far so logical. But now hear this:

Mike Bair, Boeing’s senior vice-president, admitted that the aircraft’s appearance had more to do with marketing than aerodynamics.

"The airlines wanted something that people would recognise. So that influenced the design, much to the chagrin of our engineers who normally decide what the aircraft is going to look like."

The "chagrin of our engineers"!

Mr Bair said Boeing would even be willing to sacrifice a small amount of efficiency in order to preserve the Dreamliner's unique appearance. Andrew Doyle, of Flight International magazine, said Boeing was desperate to have an aircraft as distinctive as the double-deck A380 but added that the key factor in the battle between the two aircraft would be people's willingness to fly with 800 other people.

The significance of this little moment in aircraft history would, from the aesthetic point of view, be hard to overestimate. For a century, the airplane has been held up by designers (and in particular by envious architects) as the perfect expression of how form follows function. When Le Corbusier wanted to rethink architecture, he said it should be done like a modern airplane, not like the decorated Victoriana he so hated.

But now, the aesthetics of airplanes has gone beyond painting them in wild and wacky colours. The very shape of the airplane itself is now being considered as a distinct matter from the mere engineering considerations which give rise to such shapes. Form has stopped entirely following function. Now, function is starting to accommodate itself to form. And form comes not (only) from the engineers, but from the comics and the movies and sculpting department where they attend to such things. (Virginia Postrel must surely have spotted this, and loved it, although searching for Boeing at her blog didn't yield any treasure.)

Airplanes are now becoming like cars, in other words.