The more immediate provenance of the Skyray was a visit to Paris in the week following VE Day, during which Douglas engineers Gene Root and A.M.O. Triangular and airworthy, zanonia seeds can glide a good distance from their parent vine on the weak thermals of the Indonesian rainforest. He, in turn, attributed the delta wing to a gift of a zanonia seed, sent him by a colleague during the 1920s. Many had been inspired by the 1930s experimentation of German aircraft designer Alexander Lippisch. It was exotic and fast, the first of the high-performance designs born during the post-World War II fascination with delta wings, which sprouted on military aircraft around the world like fins on late-1950s automobiles. In fact, there was nothing Ford-like about the Skyray. Named the Skyray for the unique shape of its wing, LeFaivre’s aircraft was known by those who flew and cared for it as the Ford, from its designation, F4D, and fighter pilots’ penchant for understatement. To do this, the jet would have to reach 40,000 feet in five minutes and be able to fight when it got there. Yet as of May 23, 1958, Ed LeFaivre’s airplane could still outclimb any other military jet, foreign or domestic.ĭouglas designed the aircraft to meet the Navy’s 1947 requirement for a land- or carrier-based jet interceptor quick enough to catch and kill an approaching enemy bomber flying at 500 knots (575 mph) and 40,000 feet within a 100-mile radar range. The airplane that set that mark was not a daring experiment in delta-wing technology, but a Navy fighter that had been in development for more than a decade, had served with the fleet for two years, and was already entering the twilight of its service life. It was the fastest time to that altitude in history. Two minutes and 36.05 seconds after releasing the brakes, LeFaivre was at 50,000 feet. The aircraft screamed down the runway for the ten seconds it needed to reach 150 mph and lifted off in a 70-degree climb, tracked by missile-range cameras and radar. LeFaivre applied full power with the brakes on, then, brakes off, lit the afterburner. Pointing the airplane into the dense, cold air flowing off the Pacific, Marine Corps Major Edward N. Navigation.Near dawn on a sparkling spring day, a tailless jet fighter shaped like a manta ray taxied into position on Runway 21 at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, California. Wing into simple shapes which you can compute. Then from the equation for a trapezoid, theĪrea is one half the sum of the tip and root chords times the semi-span Įqual to one half of the root chord times the semi-span įor a compound configuration like the Space Shuttle, you have to break up the Is the distance from the root to the wing tip, and the chord length at the Of these shapes-a skill learned in high school and used every day byįor the rectangular wing the area is equal to the span (s) times the chord (c) įor a trapezoidal wing, we need to know the semi-span (s), which To figure out how much liftĪ wing will generate, you must be able to calculate the area of any Rectangular, triangular, trapezoidal, or even in complex combinations You can see that wings come in many different planforms: Modern aircraft typically have wings on either side of the The Wrightīrothers stacked their two wings one on top of the other, while Shown above, we are looking at only one of the two wings. Viewed from above while looking down on the wing-a view called the This slide shows the wing shapes for a variety of aircraft as
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