Variations in the Airfoil Trace the History of Flight

Variations in the airfoil trace the history of flight. By Walter J. Boyne INGS have always captured the wing, or the elimination of all or W human imagination. The my- part of the wing. thology of flight is found in every culture. Despite this fascination, it Aerodynamic Magic was not until the nineteenth century Since the late 1940s, aerodynamic that scientists began to use precise progress has accelerated at an ever mathematics to compute the opti- greater rate, so much so that modern mum size and shape of wings for a engineering methods and materials flying machine. have combined with new require- Orville and Wilbur Wright did it ments to create totally new wing best with their 1903 Flyer, forcing configurations. Now, elaborate high- competitors to try wings of all shapes, lift devices are tucked into wing lead- styles, and dimensions to avoid in- ing and trailing edges to deploy dur- fringing on their patents. Some went ing the approach to landing, with the to multiple wings—triplanes, quadra- slats and flaps folding out like hand- planes, and more. Others altered the kerchiefs from a magician's sleeve. shape of wings to sweptback, tan- Some by-products have become dem, joined, and cruciform. perhaps too sophisticated. Where Most of the results were too inef- the thick wing of a Douglas C-47 ficient to fly; some were capable of "Gooney Bird" would let you plow generating just enough lift to stag- through cold, wet clouds forever, ger through the air if coupled with a shaking off the ice buildup with sufficiently powerful engine, and a pneumatic boots, some modern air- very few were both stable and effi- foils—as on the Aerospatiale/Alenia cient. ATR-42—have become so efficient At least since the Greeks crafted the Some concepts were diametrically that even a small buildup of ice myth of Icarus (depicted here in an opposed—very low aspect ratio (the becomes a deadly hazard. eighteenth century woodcut), man has dreamt of taking wing. That ratio of span to chord) vs. high as- On the other hand, the increased dream was realized in 1903 by the pect ratio, or a pure wing form vs. a sophistication has occasionally per- Wright brothers and is carried on lifting body—yet success was some- mitted a return to some of the ideas today in the B-2, the most successful times found at either end of the spec- put forward by earlier inventors but flying-wing design ever. trum. not realized at the time for technical, From the 1920s through the 1940s, mechanical, or even political, rea- advances in aeronautical engineer- sons. Thus, the unsuccessful tandem ing resulted in much stronger, more wing design of Samuel Pierpont complex wings using now familiar Langley was reprised through the high-lift devices and modern airfoils. years, first by the French Albessard Nonetheless, variations in span, in- "Tri-avion" and Arsenal-Delanne 10 cidence, and geometry persisted. For fighter, and most recently by Burt some, the ultimate goal became the Rutan with his Advanced Technol- elimination of all surfaces except ogy Tactical Transport. 74 AIR FORCE Magazine / October 1996 trolled flights around its home field at Cicero, Ill. Flying Flapjacks In later years, there were dozens of attempts to obtain the high lift be- lieved to be inherent in low-aspect- ratio aircraft. Some of the most successful of these were designed by Charles H. Zimmerman, who en- hanced the low-aspect-ratio concept by directing the airflow from very large propellers over the entire wing surface in the 1942 Vought V-173 "Flying Pancake." The V-173 was flown successfully by Boone T. Guyton, Charles A. Lind- bergh, and Najeeb E. Halaby, among others, and was developed into the wicked-looking Vought XF5U-1, a In a similar way, the greatest come- i back has been that of the flying wing, hoen Sc t Ar well expressed by the Wrights in tesy their 1901 glider and found now on r the flight line at Whiteman AFB, cou Mo., in the superlative form of the to Northrop Grumman B-2 bomber. Pho The Wrights went on to attach el- evators and rudders but maintained their strongly braced biplane wings. This combination of wings was a masterpiece of design, with a bal- ance of span, chord, and gap that was imitated by myriad other designers. Coupled with their insight into the need for three-axis control, the Wrights set the pattern for most other inventors of the time, few of whom were deterred by the brothers' patents. Some, such as Glenn H. Curtiss, Aircraft designers sometimes use the same approach to solve different problems. The Vought V-173 "Flying Pancake" (above) owes its low-aspect- used a similar biplane layout, em- ratio design to a quest for reduced drag, while Lockheed Martin's F-117 (top) ploying ailerons in an attempt to cir- takes a similar shape in order to reduce radar signature. cumvent the patents. Other inventors depended on their intuition, their aesthetic sense, or their fascination the Flick-Reinig "Apteroid" of 1911, circular-planform Navy fighter. The with complex mechanical solutions whose biplane wings ran fore and aft XF5U-1, too radical and made obso- to approach flight in a way they hoped along the fuselage rather than per- lete by the jet engine, was dismantled differed from the Wrights' method. pendicular to it, as if it had been before its first flight. Wilbur Wright' s triumphant exhi- packaged for shipment by railcar. Low-aspect-ratio wings found their bition at Le Mans, France, in 1908 Many_ low-aspect-ratio airplanes ultimate expression in the delta-wing opened the floodgates of European followed, including the McConnick designs that flowed from the genius imagination and turned loose an out- Romme "umbrella plane" of 1912. of Dr. Alexander M. Lippisch, whose pouring of innovative designs. Al- Designed by the young Chance Vought, first delta-wing aircraft flew in 1931. though most of these were failures, it had a circular wing absolutely de- He followed with a series of inno- many of them forecast future trends. void of camber and in appearance was vative designs, most notably the The low aspect ratio found in the no more than a set of loosely con- world' s first delta-wing, rocket- Lockheed Martin F-117 Nighthawk nected awnings. When a rip-roaring powered fighter—the Messerschmitt stealth fighter or the older Convair fifty-horsepower Gnome-Rh8ne rotary Me-163 Komet. After World War II, F-102 Delta Dagger and F-106 Delta engine was installed, however, the the delta-wing layout served many Dart interceptors was anticipated "doughnut," as it was called, not only aircraft well, including the beautiful by many aircraft, beginning with managed to get airborne but made con- Convair B-58 Hustler, the first su- 76 AIR FORCE Magazine / October 1996 personic bomber. Foreign manufac- bert A. Merrill designed a stall-proof ground-adjustable wing sweep for turers who adopted the delta con- biplane. That same year, George W. comparative flight tests. Bell adapted figuration include Dassault, Avro, Cornelius created his first variable- the design in 1951 with the X-5, Fairey, Saab, Tupelov, and the MiG angle-of-incidence aircraft and fol- whose wings could be swept from Design Bureau. lowed it a few years later with his 200 to 60°, making it the first high- Success was easier at the other "Mallard," which had both variable performance aircraft to fly with a end of the aspect-ratio spectrum. incidence and forward-swept wings. variable-geometry wing. High-aspect-ratio wings were unde- The practical success of variable in- Grumman experimented with vari- niably efficient and were widely used cidence came in 1955 with the debut able-geometry wings in its unsuccess- by sailplanes. The French manufac- of the Vought (later LTV) F8U Cru- ful XF10E-1 Jaguar of 1952. The prin- turer Hurel-Dubois carried the idea sader, whose object was not avoid- ciple of the swing wing served its a step further with its extremely high- ing a stall but getting off a carrier successor, the F-14 Tomcat, well, as it aspect-ratio, strut-braced-wing air- deck. did a number of US and foreign aircraft of the late 1940s. The idea lapsed The Germans led the way in vari- craft, including the US F-111 and B-1, for years, only to be revived by the able-geometry wings with the Mes- the Soviet MiG-23 and Su-24, and the successful Short Brothers transports, serschmitt P-1101 jet prototype. It European consortium Panavia's Tor- such as USAF's C-23 Sherpa. never flew but was to have had nado. By the 1930s, while most of the world's aeronautical engineers strug- gled toward a common denominator of the cantilever low-wing all-metal aircraft, some designers persisted in pressing for unorthodox solutions to specific problems. The concept of variable-span wings was tried in the 1931 mono- plane designed in France by Mikhail Makhonine, a Russian engineer. The handsome aircraft featured exten- sible outer wing panels that could vary the wingspan from forty-three feet to sixty-nine feet and the wing area from 226 to 335 square feet. The greater wingspan allowed for takeoff with greater loads. At alti- tude, the wings retracted for more speed. Other inventors sought safety with their unorthodox designs. In 1931, Al- Accidental Benefit Fixed wing sweep had been built into dozens of aircraft since the ear- liest days of flight, often as a solu- tion to center-of-gravity problems.

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