It is undeniable that commercial transport jets are undergoing an "extreme makeover" in advanced composites. Composite materials account for roughly half of the structural weight on Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner and Airbus Industries' materializing A350 XWB. That's more than double the percentage on commercial jets introduced just 10 years ago and triple that of predecessors brought to market during the early 1990s. While this is rightly considered a revolution, it tends to overshadow the equally significant but much earlier transformation of primary and secondary structures in the helicopter industry. While the Boeing 777 and Airbus A340 programs were "aggressively" adopting composites for 10 to 15 percent of their structural weight, the airframes of some commercial helicopters were already half composite, and those of many military rotorcraft were almost entirely composite (se Fig. 1, p. 48).
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