My Dallas EAA chapter had a NASA engineer talk to us at least 20 years ago. His statement was if your airplane design was such that you could not go well over 200 mph that a tapered wing would not help you as far as speed. He said the most drag in piston driven aircraft was in the engine cooling department. NASA had, under his direction towed an old Cessna 172 up to X altitude with engine cooling inlets sealed off, released to glide down, measuring rate of decent, distance traveled etc as compared to same airplane with open inlets, dead engine. I think he told us that 40% of the total aircraft's drag was engine cooling related. He told all of us to build rectangular wings because the construction would be more simple and to concentrate on smoothing out the air flowing through the engine compartment if we wanted to go faster. I would assume one way to go slower would be to dirty up your cooling system more than it already is!! If one were to choose the Hershey Bar type, at least you would have something sweet if stranded out in the middle of no where. : ) Larry H.
________________________________ There's an article that appears to cover all angles of the rectangular wing at http://www.flyingmag.com/article.asp?section_id=12&article_id=170 . Make sure you read all three pages. I put "rectangular wing" into Google and this was the one on top...probably for good reason. Peter Garrison wrote it... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL mail: N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website: www.N56ML.com
