RE: Flat plate equivalent area ?
I don't know what plane your avitar is, it looks a lot like a Sierra Sportplane S-1. I had been following the Probe design for about a year before the crash. He had been blogging on the development for quite a while before. For instance, he said that this was the second one of the airplanes he built, as the first one was in a land fill.
There was also a rather extensive write-up (9 or 10 pages) in a book written by Bruce Carmichael, called "Personal Aircraft Drag Reduction" published in 1996. He calculated a complete build-up of the drag for the design. While there are truly countless numbers of books on wings, very few books look at the rest of the airplane since it is so difficult to quantify.