Search Results

Other factors equal, a thinner ("sharper") leading edge will generally reduce drag in an airfoil. There are tradeoffs, however; first and foremost in this case is the much more abrupt onset of stall …

A metal control surface can also sustain some small arms fire without disintegrating -- aircraft with metal rudders and elevators used to routinely come home with bullet holes in those surfaces. The …

In automotive engines in general, the main bearings and front and rear end bearings are journal bearings, with near-zero end load tolerance (the end bearings have small flanges, but mainly for locatio …

There are a number of small (ultralight, Light Sport categories) aircraft that run on pure battery power for anywhere from a few minutes to (as I recall) nearly an hour of powered flight -- a couple o …

Net wing loading (weight per unit lifting area) can't be zero in level flight. Lift must equal weight, else the aircraft will accelerate in the direction of the net force. The loading distribution o …

There are a few drones that use a non-rotating Coanda surface (blown by a ducted fan or centrifugal fan) for lift, with moving flaps for two-axis control (throttle is used to control altitude). This …

I can see one reasonable possibility here: fan lift. You don't want to build a Helio Courier update and try to make it go fast in the air; you want to build something like a Bonanza or Skymaster and …

The earliest ultralights (hang gliders with add-on engines) used engines with as little as six horsepower (about 4 kW), possibly smaller. That said, these aircraft were originally built as foot-launc …

Most tailplanes (except for specialist applications, like endurance designs in model airplanes) have a symmetrical airfoil, whether thickened or effectively a flat plate. Camber of any sort is unusua …

No. One relatively trivial example is a tandem wing (or a canard with a very large forward surface, if you will); the center of mass will be between the lifting surfaces, positioned so that the forwa …

Looking closely at the photo, that's an Embraer 175. I Googled other photos of the same model aircraft, and all of them have a similar flat surface. It appears to be a flat designed into the aft fus …

Based on my experience (seeing, not flying) with radio control models, no, not completely. I have seen "drag buckets" added to ailerons, as well as coupled spoilers, which can come close, but there a …

You hit it -- the thinner airfoil has the same effect as the wing twist known as "wash-out", that of delaying the stall at the tip. This is generally desired, because a tip stall tends to initiate a …

On some scale, of course this works -- look up "EDF", Electric Ducted Fan R/C models of jet planes. For something the size of a Honda Jet, you still likely wouldn't get the performance (and certainly …

Different applications have different optima, in aviation as in most other things. If you're maximizing one combination of overall performance, pilot forward vision (in the nose-up landing and taxi a …