At 07:57 PM 12/17/02 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
pointing out that the hershey bar Cherokee wing is almost optimum for
performance....but maybe not looks.... The rectangular wing attains the
best performance and cost of construction because in performance it
atttains the optimum shape for a wing which seems to be an elipse.
I had read somewhere that the Spitfire, of Battle of Britain fame, was a
supurb plane because of the eliptical wing. That wing is
also hard to make because you can only do two ribs the same - one on each
side!
Granted that the "Hershey Bar" wing is not the worse, it probably is the
cheapest to build. One of the things Fred Weick did
at Piper was show that metal construction was less costly than fabric
cover. That was what convinced Pug to build the Cherokee.
Percy in Portland
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