If you’ve spent any time looking at pictures of airplanes or taken a walk around an airport (highly recommended) you may have noticed that there is an enormous variation in the size and shape of the wings attached to each aircraft. An aircraft’s wing is the primary contributor to it's ability to generate a lifting force greater than its weight, and therefore take flight. In this post we discuss the importance of wing design, specifically wing area and aspect ratio, and show why it is a great place to start when designing a new airplane. In the previous post we examined the lift, drag, and pitching moment coefficient acting on an aerodynamic body caused by the resulting pressure and shear distribution.
This is the third post in a series of fundamental aircraft design articles which aim to give you an introduction to aircraft design principles.