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In aeronautics, a flexible wing is an airfoil or aircraft wing which can deform in flight. Early pioneer aeroplanes such as the Wright flyer used the flexible characteristics of lightweight construction to control flight through wing warping. Others made collapsible wings for folding away, such as the flying car designs by Gustave Whitehead.
An adaptive compliant wing is a wing which is flexible enough for aspects of its shape to be changed in flight. [1] [2] Flexible wings have a number of benefits.Conventional flight control mechanisms operate using hinges, resulting in disruptions to the airflow, vortices, and in some cases, separation of the airflow.
This was a significant influence on early aircraft designers. The Wright brothers were the first group to use warping wings. Their first plane mimicked the bird's flight patterns and wing form. [3] In practice, since most wing warping designs involved flexing of structural members, they were difficult to control and liable to cause structural ...
A fixed-wing aircraft may have more than one wing plane, stacked one above another: Biplane: two wing planes of similar size, stacked one above the other.The biplane is inherently lighter and stronger than a monoplane and was the most common configuration until the 1930s.
Planes can withstand the weather. Next time you’re flying through turbulence, look out the window at the wing. You’ll notice it flexing. It’s supposed to do that.
Sweep back of the wings has the same effect on incidence, but since the wings are not inclined in the vertical plane, backsweep alone does not affect . However, anhedral may be used with high backsweep angles in high performance aircraft to offset the wing incidence effects of sideslip.
One promising approach that could rival slats are flexible wings. In flexible wings, much or all of a wing surface can change shape in flight to deflect air flow. The X-53 Active Aeroelastic Wing is a NASA effort. The adaptive compliant wing is a military and commercial effort. [7] [8] [9]
These videos detail the Active Aeroelastic Wing two-phase NASA-Air Force flight research program to investigate the potential of aerodynamically twisting flexible wings to improve maneuverability of high-performance aircraft at transonic and supersonic speeds, with traditional control surfaces such as ailerons and leading-edge flaps used to ...