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What is the Fuselage? The fuselage carries all of the necessary cargo in an airplane, for example, the flight crew, cargo, and or passengers. Depending on how you look at things, the fuselage is either the most important or the least important part on an airplane. But one thing is for certain, it does more hindering than helping in the flight aspect. Commercial airlines view the fuselage as the accommodations for passengers, whereas freight companies see it as more of a storage container for their cargo. Very simply, the fuselage is there to put stuff in. Besides this role that the fuselage plays, it also does provide the plane with some lift. In most cases this lift is rather insignificant, but at high velocities and less weight, this lift force becomes much more important. 
Fuselage Problems When an airplane is soaring through the air, most of the form drag comes from the fuselage. Its cross sectional area is by far the largest of any of the components on the plane. The fuselage also creates friction drag, due to its proportionately long body. Basically, the fuselage is a big drag producer. The more drag there is on an airplane, the less efficiently it flies. Decreasing the drag due to the fuselage would drastically improve the aircraft performance and fuel efficiency, among other benefits. 
A fuselage should be large and strong enough to carry all of the intended mass be it cargo, people or a mixture of those two. However, the fuselage should also be as light as possible to minimize the amount of weight that the wings have to produce lift for. This demand of two opposing criteria also presents another problem. Keep in mind, most of the weight force comes from the fuselage, but its counteracting force--lift primarily comes from the wings. This creates immense structural stress where the wings meet the fuselage. Decreasing this stress would mean decreasing the overall structural weight. The Ideal Design To cover the major aerodynamic problems, the drag due to the fuselage should be minimized, and the fuselage itself should be as light as possible, yet strong enough to support the mass inside. The drag could be kept to a minimum simply by keeping the surface as smooth as possible. The structural weight however could be lightened by a concept known as even load distribution. Even Load Distribution In this concept, engineers hope to build planes so incredibly large that their proportionately correct wings would be large enough to carry the normal cargo of today. In this way, the source of the weight is distributed more evenly with the source of the lift. This in turn cuts down on the stress at the wing roots meaning the structural weight will also decrease. However, in order for something like this to work empty planes would weigh around 3 million pounds! It would be some time before these behemoths become the standard for commercial airlines. 
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