The wings don't care how it feels to the pilot!
The physics is well understood, but not by most non-aeronautical engineers.
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6 years ago
contrail
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6 years ago
There's still a lot of undiscovered stuff, and a lot of experimenting in wind tunnels. Winglets and strakes, for example.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
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6 years ago
We were talking about absolute basics that were /very/ well understood by the 1940s (see "Stick and Rudder", chapter 9, 1944, still in print!). By comparison winglets and strakes are merely optimisation tweaks :)
But winglets have been around for a long time; apparently some WW2 bombers had them then. The modern variants were first described in the mid 70s, but only took off (ho ho) in the early 90s (on gliders, naturally).