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by andikleen2
458 days ago
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If you read Anderson "A history of Aerodynamics" it disagrees on this point. It states that the Wright's didn't have a good way to calculate drag, and they didn't understand many of the side effects from real wings (like flow separation) which caused wrong measurements initially. Later on they apparently came back to something that was closer to Lilienthal's numbers, even though the problem simply wasn't fully understood at the time. This paper has a similar conclusion:
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi... "When the Wright brothers compared their results with those of Lilienthal, they found some
disagreement, but not as much as they expected. As Wilbur states in his diary for October
16, 1901: "It would appear that Lilienthal is very much nearer the truth then we have
heretofore been disposed to think." [Wolko, 21]. 17 The formulas were still not producing
the lift and drag that were actually being produced. The only other possible source of error
in these equations was the Smeaton coefficient of air pressure." |
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