New answers tagged aviation-history
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was there any legitimate reason for it?
Unused tools, the tools for making a plane which isn't made anymore, are most probably put somewhere in storage, since the factory floor is best used for actual production.
While an aircraft plant for making top-notch, spyplanes is generally quite secure, any storage facility is probably less secured. Maintaining a ...
3
It is arguable that these planes are not true flying wings because things like the pilot and engine sit or dangle outside the wing airfoil. Besides Dunne's D.1, D.3, D.4, D.5, D.8 and D.10 of varying success, W Starling Burgess in the US built 19 Burgess-Dunne tailless biplanes, many of them waterplanes, e.g. the 1916 AH-7.
The 1930 Smith B2 Arrowhead was a ...
4
In the US, the department of commerce had an Aeronautics Branch. It was first responsible for civil aviation safety. On February 28, 1927 it published a list of the first physicians, who were qualified to give medical examinations for pilot licenses.
On December 31, 1926, the Aeronautics Branch issued the first air commerce regulations, that included ...
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To fly, a wing must maintain its angle of attack within a certain range. If the AOA is too low, the wing produces no lift. If the AOA is too high, air moving over the top cannot follow the wing's contour, separates, and causes a reduction in lift (aerodynamic stall). Designs that employ passive stability to maintain an appropriate AOA will make the aircraft ...
0
Wing ribs are usually made with the aid of a template or tool. For metal wings, it could be the male and female parts of a mould used in a press. For wooden wings it's a board with blocks of wood that hold all the pieces in place while the glue dries. Either way, a rectangular wing only needs one tool for each rib, while a tapered wing needs a different tool ...
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It looks like a 1921 Blackburn Dart, British carrier-based torpedo bomber biplane.
(source)
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The benefit of tapered wing lies in its proximity to the elliptical lift distribution while retaining much of the structural benefit of a rectangular wing. But we owe this knowledge to a few things:
The Kutta-Joukowski Theorem: published in 1906 by Nikolai Y. Joukowski and influenced a great deal by Martin W. Kutta.
The Lifting Line Theory: published in ...
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A rectangle gives the maximum area for a given span, and for something like the Flyer, running on 12 hp, they needed all the wing area they could get in the lightest possible package, so rectangular it is. Plus it's the easiest structure to build with minimum weight, since all the joints are simple 90 deg ones and the simple cross braced ladder structure is ...
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The rectangular "Hershey Bar" is a safe reliable, and yes, easier to build design.
But if you look more carefully at the Wright Flyer wings, you can see they were already rounding off the trailing edges to decrease drag. Tapering to a point serves the same function, and also enables one to build a bit more lightly due to reduced torque stress from the end ...
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The Wright catapult was powered by a 635 kg weight, dropped 5 meters.
It's potential energy, before dropping, mgh = 635 kg × 9.8 m/s^2 × 5 meters = 31115 Joules.
The 408 kg Flyer II was connected to the drop weight with a compound pulley that moved it 15 meters when the weight dropped 5 meters.
Dropping the weight converted potential energy to kinetic ...
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Right now I'm only imagining two kinds, an airframe factory and an engine factory.
The plane's skin needs to be built, as well as all the electronics, all the cables, gauges, radios, guns, missiles, electric wiring, pumps, radar, radar receivers, ejection seats, the plexiglas canopy and windshield, the rubber wheels, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Hundreds of ...
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To create a lift, the airflow speed on top of the wings should be higher than the airflow speed on the bottom of the wings.
That is correct. Lift is the result of a pressure difference between upper and lower side, and pressure is proportional to the inverse of speed squared if no energy is added.
But when you keep the engine on the bottom of the wings, ...
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No, because the air is still turning the same way. It might even help a little bit, depending on the wing shape.
To create lift you need lower pressure above the wing than below, but the difference in speed is the effect, not cause of this. The cause is that the air would like to continue moving straight due to inertia, and the pressure decreases above ...
6
To create a lift, the airflow speed on top of the wings should be higher than the airflow speed on the bottom of the wings.
No, that's not true.
In order to create lift, the pressure on top of the wings must be lower than the pressure on the bottom of the wings. The airflow speed doesn't matter.
I'm guessing your thought process is something like this:
...
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You're going by an old outdated lift theory, still taught in a lot of places. The wing induces a very large package of air to move down as it's going along, and this newtonian action/reaction of this package of air being induced to move down is most of "lift". The Bernoulli part is important, because the pressure differential is a factor and it also is ...
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I suspect it's because the business case just wasn't there. Every retrofit project I've been involved in boiled down to the money. Retrofits aren't cheap and ultimately the mods have to recoup those costs through improved revenue or decreased operating expenses.
Looking at your references, there was some structural changes to the wing and landing gear ...
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