- #1
Alan1000
- 25
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Was the Spitfire "area-ruled"?
Any aerodynamicists out there?
The Supermarine Spitfire, designed in the mid-1930s, supposedly enjoyed the highest mach rating of any propellor-driven fighter in World War 2. Even the Mustang, with its state-of-the-art laminar flow wing, could not match the Spitfire in the dive.
While looking at a photo of a Spitfire recently, it occurred to me that it had a somewhat area-ruled fuselage. If you look at a picture taken from slightly above, you can see that immediately behind the engine cylinder banks, roughly in line with the wing leading edge, there is a substantial tapering-off of fuselage cross-sectional area. This continues for some distance, then, behind the point of maximum chord thickness, the cockpit canopy causes cross sectional area to increase once more.
This "area-ruling" was presumably not designed as such, because the concept hadn't been thought of then (as far as I know). But how significant was it, I wonder, in delaying the onset of compressibility effects?
Any aerodynamicists out there?
The Supermarine Spitfire, designed in the mid-1930s, supposedly enjoyed the highest mach rating of any propellor-driven fighter in World War 2. Even the Mustang, with its state-of-the-art laminar flow wing, could not match the Spitfire in the dive.
While looking at a photo of a Spitfire recently, it occurred to me that it had a somewhat area-ruled fuselage. If you look at a picture taken from slightly above, you can see that immediately behind the engine cylinder banks, roughly in line with the wing leading edge, there is a substantial tapering-off of fuselage cross-sectional area. This continues for some distance, then, behind the point of maximum chord thickness, the cockpit canopy causes cross sectional area to increase once more.
This "area-ruling" was presumably not designed as such, because the concept hadn't been thought of then (as far as I know). But how significant was it, I wonder, in delaying the onset of compressibility effects?