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The Aerodynamic Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

William S. Farren
William S. Farren*
Affiliation:
A. V. Roe & Co. Ltd.
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Extract

Aerodynamics is the foundation on which we build aircraft, as did the Wright Brothers. In their day, it was something of a mystery. It has become a profession in itself—a Science and an Art.

Its parent science—the mechanics of fluids—is one of the most difficult branches of the general science of mechanics, which is itself possibly not one of the easier departments of science. The simplest of our flying machines is aerodynamically excessively complex. We have always been prepared to design and build aircraft to meet extraordinarily severe conditions. There is only one yardstick by which we can expect to be judged—results. We need all our skill—and skill is art, though not the whole of it.

Type
The 44th Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 60 , Issue 547 , July 1956 , pp. 431 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1956

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References

page no 433 note on * Figures 3 and 11 are reproduced through the courtesy of The Clarendon Press, Oxford, and are from Plate 12 (Figs, b and c) Modern Developments in Fluid Dynamics, Vol. I, edited by S. Goldstein, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1938. The photographs were originally provided by the late Professor Prandtl from a dissertation by Dr. F. Homann in Forchung auf dem Gebiete Ingenieurwesens 7, 1936.

page no 433 note on † The photographs in this and the following figures are the work of the High Speed Group of the Aerodynamics Division, N.P.L., under Dr. Holder. To them, and to others who have helped me, my thanks are expressed at the end of this paper.

page no 437 note on * See footnote to Figure 3 (p. 433).

page no 443 note on * I believe that the first suggestion that this characteristic of the trailing-edge pressure/Mach number relation would be a reliable indication of the onset of the effects of separation was made in 1954 in a paper by D. W. Holder, H. H. Pearcy and G. E. Gadd, on “ The Interaction between Shock Waves and Boundary Layers.”