Page 214 - Understanding Flight

CH08_Anderson 7/25/01 9:01 AM Page 201

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CHAPTER

Aerodynamic Testing

ou have been introduced to many concepts of flight, from lift to
performance. One might ask how the designers know that their
Ycalculations are correct and, once the airplane is constructed, how
the performance is determined. This is the subject of aerodynamic
testing, first in a wind tunnel and finally in the air.

Wind-Tunnel Testing

Wind-tunnel tests were performed well before the first The first Boeing 747 completed
airplanes flew. Most of the early wind tunnels were built to more than 15,000 hours of
perform experiments of fundamental fluid motion. The wind-tunnel testing.
scientists who built these apparatuses were not interested in
flight, but instead the physics of fluids. The Wright brothers can be
credited as being one of the first to use a wind tunnel to test
aerodynamic shapes. Their ingenuity and accomplishments in testing
are still a source of amazement after 100 years. Many pages could be
and have been written on these accomplishments, so we will not go
into detail here. The important thing to note is that the Wright
brothers recognized the need for useful aerodynamic data and so built
a wind tunnel and a device that could measure lift.

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