In this configuration, the vertical tail sits at the rear of the fuselage with the horizontal stabilizer attached to the fuselage below the vertical tail. Some of the most common configurations are shown below:Ī number of the most common aircraft tail configurationsĪs the name suggests, the conventional tail arrangement is the most common. There are a number of common empennage arrangements that most aircraft adhere to. To assist in the pitch and yaw control of the aircraft by the movement of control surfaces affixed to the stabilizing surfaces.To provide stability in the longitudinal (pitch) and directional (yaw) axes during flight.Similar to how the feathers on an arrow stabilize the arrow in flight, the tail ensures that the aircraft remains stable through all phases of operation.Īn aircraft tail has two primary objectives: The tail assembly (horizontal and vertical stabilizer) is also known as the empennage which originates from the French term empenner which means to “feather an arrow”. A Cessna 172 with the Horizontal and Vertical Stabilizer Labelled The two tail surfaces are shown below in a conventional layout pictured on a Cessna 172. While there are a number of possible tail configurations, the majority are comprised of a horizontal surface and a vertical surface which stabilize the aircraft in the longitudinal and directional axis respectively. We’ll then introduce an empirical method to size both surfaces on a new aircraft design.Īlmost all aircraft flying today have a tail located towards the rear of the fuselage. Now we move onto the aircraft tail section and examine the function of both the horizontal and vertical tail. In the previous posts we’ve looked at both the wing and fuselage in some detail. Lockheed continued to use the basic design on many of its aircraft proposals in the 1950s, including the Lockheed CL-400 Suntan and early versions of their supersonic transport designs.This is part 8 in the Fundamentals of Aircraft Design series.
However the high loading of the wing resulted in a high stalling speed with marginal take-off and landing characteristics and a corresponding high level of takeoff and landing accidents.Ī variant with a curved airfoil, blunt trailing edge and conventional internal structure was developed for the North American X-15 rocket plane. Consequently, the type was adopted for the ground-attack role, notably by the German Luftwaffe. The small wing of the Starfighter was found to have good gust response at low level, providing a smooth ride at high subsonic speeds. Even with this low-drag wing the Douglas X-3 Stiletto was too underpowered to reach its design flight speed of Mach 2, but the design of its simple hexagonal-airfoil wing was developed for various other X-planes and for Lockheed's widely produced F-104 Starfighter Mach 2.2 high-altitude interceptor. They were made so thin that they had to be machined from a thick, solid sheet of metal. Įarly examples provided a solution to the problem of supersonic flight when engine power was limited. For minimum drag, wing loading can be in excess of 400 kilograms per square metre (82 lb/sq ft). Low span and an unswept, tapered planform reduce structural stresses, allowing the wing to be made thin. The transition form, where the trailing edge is straight, is equivalent to a cropped delta planform.Īt supersonic speeds a thin, small and highly loaded wing offers substantially lower drag than other configurations. This increases the sweep of the leading edge and decreases the sweep of the trailing edge, and in the extreme case both edges sweep backwards by different amounts. In a swept trapezoidal wing, the line of maximum chord is swept at an angle, usually forward. The leading edge then sweeps backwards and the trailing edge sweeps forward.
In a straight trapezoidal wing, such as on the Bell X-1, the thickest part of the wing along its span, the line of maximum chord, runs straight out sideways from root to tip. In level flight, the amount of lift is equal to the gross weight. The wing loading w is then given by the lift L divided by the area: The area A of such a trapezoidal wing may be calculated from the span s, root chord c r and tip chord c t:Ī = s c r + c t 2 Any wing with straight leading and trailing edges and with differing root and tip chords is a trapezoid, whether or not it is swept.
0 kommentar(er)
