Modern stage of development of aviation industry has very important specific. New aircraft project in most cases is a variant of an existing aircraft which has shown its success in time of service. Such way can reduce time and cost for design process. It can also improve cost-effectiveness of this family of aircraft. However, such approach requires more accurate design process for a basic variant of the aircraft, because on its basis in the future many variants will be developed. And any wrong design solution can create problems for future application of this basic aircraft project. For the development of transport category aircraft variants, it is necessary to increase their transport efficiency and cost effectiveness. In many cases it is necessary to make deep adjustments to the wing geometric parameters. The approach for the development of variants changes for the distribution of local chords for tapered wings with according to their equivalence ratio to an elliptical wing in order to minimize the induced drag for the certain value of the tapered wing lift is proposed. The allowable range of the taper ratio for a simple tapered wing is determined and design solutions are outlined that provide the minimum induced drag coefficient for wing shapes formed by several trapezoids.