DESMO | Aircraft Preliminary Design Software Solution

Addressing modern aircraft complexity

Early-phase aircraft design is often driven by fragmented tools,

spreadsheets, or isolated scripts. While useful for single questions,

these approaches do not scale when configurations, missions,

or architectures change.

Classical methods also fail to capture the strong coupling

introduced by modern propulsion, advanced avionics, and

rising electrical and thermal demands — leading to early

decisions that are hard to adapt, hard to defend, and

disconnected from aircraft reality.

Preliminary design beyond sizing

Modern aircraft are shaped by tightly coupled systems,
not just weight and geometry.

DESMO goes beyond traditional sizing
by exposing system interactions and
aircraft-level trade-offs early in
preliminary design, enabling faster exploration
and more defensible decisions as concepts evolve.

Why multi-fidelity support matters

Early in an aircraft program, progress depends on abstractions and

estimation methods that work despite uncertainty.

Lightweight methods enable very fast computation, rapid iteration,

and broad design space exploration.

As knowledge improves, DESMO allows engineers to increase model

fidelity step by step, without breaking consistency or rebuilding

models from scratch.

Addressing modern aircraft complexity

Early-phase aircraft design is often driven by fragmented tools, spreadsheets, or isolated scripts. While useful for single questions, these approaches do not scale when configurations, missions, or architectures change.

Classical methods also fail to capture the strong coupling introduced by modern propulsion, advanced avionics, and rising electrical and thermal demands — leading to early decisions that are hard to adapt, hard to defend, and disconnected from aircraft reality.

Preliminary design beyond sizing

Modern aircraft are shaped by tightly coupled systems, not just weight and geometry.

DESMO goes beyond traditional sizing by exposing system interactions and aircraft-level trade-offs early in preliminary design, enabling faster exploration and more defensible decisions as concepts evolve.

Why multi-fidelity support matters

Early in an aircraft program, progress depends on abstractions and estimation methods that work despite uncertainty.

Lightweight methods enable very fast computation, rapid iteration, and broad design space exploration.

As knowledge improves, DESMO allows engineers to increase model fidelity step by step, without breaking consistency or rebuilding models from scratch.

Integrated aircraft and systems modeling

Model the aircraft and its on-board systems as one coherent system, capturing coupled effects across aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, stability & control, and energy systems.

Automatic propagation of impacts

Changes to configuration, mission, payload, or architecture propagate automatically across the aircraft model, enabling fast and consistent evaluation of mass, balance, performance, and system behavior.

Multi-disciplinary trade-offs and optimization

Explore and optimize aircraft concepts using integrated MDAO workflows, supporting rapid trade-off studies across configurations, missions, and technologies.

Support for next-generation architectures

Evaluate conventional and unconventional concepts, including hybrid, electric, hydrogen-powered, and defense aircraft with high power and thermal demands.

Mission and configuration complexity from day one

Modern defense aircraft are designed as multi-role platforms, required to support a wide range of missions, payloads, and configuration variants from the earliest design phases.

Configurable hardpoints, store variations, and mission-dependent loads introduce strong coupling effects across mass, center of gravity, aerodynamics, performance, stability, electrical power, and thermal management. Classical preliminary design approaches struggle to capture these interactions consistently and early — increasing program risk and rework later in development.

In addition, modern defense aircraft are increasingly equipped with advanced, power- and thermally demanding capabilities for surveillance, survivability, advanced flight control, and mission execution. These capabilities fundamentally influence aircraft sizing, energy management, and system architecture and therefore require consideration at the aircraft level already in the preliminary design phase.

DESMO supports the definition and evaluation of complex military mission profiles and systematic variation of store and payload configurations. Aircraft-level impacts propagate automatically across the aircraft, enabling engineers to assess performance, balance, and system behavior coherently across multiple mission scenarios.

No black boxes — full control

DESMO provides full transparency: all models and methods are delivered as source code, giving engineers complete control over assumptions, parameters, and calculations.

Using DESMO’s authoring environment, users can adapt, replace, or extend methods while preserving traceability, maintainability, and long-term usability.

Designed to integrate into your ecosystem

DESMO integrates with external engineering tools and supports model reuse downstream, including FMU-based co-simulation with high-fidelity analysis environments.

Full IP protection and offline operation

DESMO operates entirely offline. Models, methods, and custom code remain fully under your control, meeting the IP protection and security requirements of commercial and defense programs.