Search Results

The paper demonstrates the importance of design and design-integration teaching at the university level. Specific topics which should be taught to equip aerospace engineering students with essential design integration skills are presented. The motivation behind this paper is threefold: 1) the large amount of costly design mistakes made during the last two decades 2) the strong trend in the aerospace industry toward ‘TOTAL ENGINEERING’ 3) the poor quality and quantity of design education in universities

The paper presents the results of a study performed under contract with NASA-Langley Research Center to document the state of the art of general aviation (GA) autopilots. The study was conducted to provide NASA-Langley with fundamental, background information about the current status of general aviation autopilot technology. The information presented is based on findings obtained from a general literature search, product literature, visitations and interviews with manufacturers, users, and service centers. Recommendations concerning potential areas of further research are also presented.

Based on recent work by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) it is shown that forward swept wings have several advantages over conventionally aft swept wings. By combining the forward swept wing with both a canard and a horizontal tail configurations emerge with interesting possibilities.

This paper describes work done under a NASA-Langley grant at the university of Kansas Flight Research Laboratory in the area of natural laminar flow and regional aircraft. The focus of this paper is on the application of natural laminar flow over various major wetted areas. In particular, efforts were concentrated on analyzing the potential benefits of achieving extensive laminar flow on the wing, empennage, and fuselage. The effect of the presence of large amounts of laminar flow is evaluated in terms of performance and efficiency improvement over an all-turbulent baseline aircraft. An introduction is given to the concept of regional aircraft, and the aerodynamic characteristics are compared to those of other airplane classes. Some recent aerodynamic developments are presented that justify, to a certain extent, the assumptions made concerning the amount of natural laminar flow that is possible for each surface.