phavoc said:
wbnc said:
funny you should mention the Piper Cub....One of the instructors at the local airport had an old Piper Cub...one day he wa practicing touch and goes when a steady wind piked up along one runway..He showed off a bit by going into the wind and throttling back..next thing we knew he was moving along at a brsk walking pace over the runway about twenty feet off the ground....he cut back the throttle a bit more and executed a near vertical landing.
The original Fling wing had very different flight characteristics over the later jet powered version..it turned out the props acted as vertical stabilizers and helped keep te plane from pitching and yawing so badly...remove the props..and the plane became unstable in flight. looking at the size of the vertical stabilizers on the lifting body in the video..It has a huge proportion of control surface for it's size...but I'd really have to see the thing go through it's paces, and watch it in spin tests before I could say how stable it was....and beg and plead to take it up myself
...I can still remember how not to crash....I think...been a few years.
Yeah, the Cub had some amazing aerodynamics to it. It helped a lot of borderline pilots learn to fly without killing themselves, or cows on the ground.
The original flying wing was a pusher-style aircraft with propellers. When they replaced the props with jet engines the engines had control vanes above and below each engine, which would have given the aircraft additional stability. It's still pretty amazing they were able to keep the aircraft stable with limited control surfaces (and not computer or scaled flight modeling).
Borderline student here
learned to fly in a Tripacer, piper cub, and Cessna 150...sadly the 15 was later crashed by one of the Instructors....and I can proudly say no cows were harmed by my first few landings..although I may still owe my instructor a pair of shorts
...just a tiny bit hamfisted on the controls at first.
the post war era was a study in trial and error, but they did discover one thing..there were lots of tiny ticks you can play with airflow and what at first looks like useless bits of gadgetry. a very minor tweak to a design could have disastrous consequences. such as something as simple as the shape of the cabin windows in an airliner.....
using a faceted body plan makes construction easier since your dealing with flat panels, and if you can trick the airflow around an object into doing what you want the air doesn't mind doing a lot of the work for you.
for example, they used some of that knowledge to redesign pick up trucks...on a lot of pickup trucks they had to shape the cab to control how the air flowed over it, and created a vortex in the bed of the truck rather than the airflow hitting the empty bed, and damming up against the tail gate...mos pickups now use a simple it of design to from a virtual surface off the cab of the truck, some air goes into eh bed of the truck whirls around in the open bed, and forces the bulk of te air to flow smoothly over the truck and down behind the rear of the truck.
you can see this by tossing a light object int he back of a newer truck, in a lot of them the object will whirl around in the bed of the truck but never get blown out because it's trapped by airflow at operating speeds. While to the human eye the truck is rather poorly designed for streamlining using airflow the designers can use airflow to turn it into a more streamlined shape...at least as far as the bulk of the air the truck passes through is concerned.
you could do the same with the blunt end of an Stype, by using some slightly different angles at the rear f the ship, airflow around it would form a vortex in atmo, and shape the airflow to something that reduces drag. by changing the vertical cross section, so that the V at the bottom of the shi was shallower than the inverted V at the top of the ship, airflow around the shape at different speeds, producing lift..and that is really how a wing works, air flows at different speed across the upper surface and lower surface...generating lift..
By changing the amount of lift produced on either side of the hull you get a force that could be used to help stabilize and maneuver the craft..say by installing popup airbrakes, or air deflectors to alter the flow of air over the body of the ship. if a designer was very clever,and had the proper software and hardware he could build an aircraft with nowing or vertical surfaces..he would just have to be really good at shaping the airflow around a shape the way he wanted to.
The Horten brothers built successful completely tailless, all wing, gliders before World War Two...now imagine what you could do with fly by wire, computer automated flight controls, and just TL-12 construction materials/techniques
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