HighPlains

My Feedback: (1)

Many designers like to meet the height and width of the fuselage requirements at the same location. Classic design, and completely wrong when you don’t have fillets to avoid separation of the air at the fuselage/wing junction. For the longest time, it was thought that you could not have laminar flow of the air down the length of the fuselage when you have a prop on the nose. Well this has been disproved since aircraft like the Nemesis were so thoroughly analyzed. It was found that the propeller wake would travel down the fuselage as a turbulent pulse of pressure, then the local flow would quickly revert to a laminar stream. The nose of our aircraft is a bit on the dirty side, but by expanding the width of the fuselage as we reach the trailing edge of the wing, we can help the local flow – perhaps by making the flow laminar, or by preventing separation at the wing/fuselage junction. Regardless, it works quite well, though is only used by a few designers. (Guys that I used to beat on a regular basis, or the guys that they now beat. Well, it took several years before the high aspect ratio wings caught on too.) So to clearly say it, place the maximum width of the fuselage at the trailing edge of the wing. How you go from the nose to this point is up to you, though I kind of like to come back nearly straight from the firewall to the thick part of the wing before expanding. I have also tried a straight line from the firewall to the trailing edge, so it is still open to play with.