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The Whitcomb area rule, named after NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb and also called the transonic area rule, is a design procedure used to reduce an aircraft's drag at transonic speeds which occur between about Mach 0.75 and 1.2.
The Cambridge Aerospace Dictionary defines shock body (also known as Whitcomb body, Küchemann carrot or speed bump) as a streamlined volume added to improve area rule distribution. [ 2 ] The anti-shock, or shock, body was one of a number of ways of implementing what was then the recently developed area rule.
After World War II, NACA research began to focus on near-sonic and low-supersonic airflow.After considering the sudden drag increase which a wing-fuselage combination experiences at somewhere around 500 mph (800 km/h), Whitcomb concluded that "the disturbances and shock waves are simply a function of the longitudinal variation of the cross-sectional area" – that is, the effect of the wings ...
In the United States, the supercritical airfoil was an area of research during the 1960s; one of the leading American figures in the field was Richard Whitcomb. A specially modified North American T-2C Buckeye functioned as an early aerial testbed for the supercritical wing, performing numerous evaluation flights during this period in support ...
Description: Richard T. Whitcomb with area-ruled F-106 aircraft (NASA 816) at the retirement of NASA 816 (used for flight research at NASA Glenn and NASA Langley) at Langley in 1991.
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Fuselage shaping was similarly changed with the introduction of the Whitcomb area rule. Whitcomb had been working on testing various airframe shapes for transonic drag when, after watching a presentation by Adolf Busemann in 1952, he realized that the Sears-Haack body had to apply to the entire aircraft, not just the fuselage. This meant that ...
Richard Whitcomb, may refer to: Richard S. Whitcomb (1894–1982), a United States Army general Richard T. Whitcomb (1921–2009), an American aeronautical engineer