Video
Blog!
October
2008
| Oct 31, 2008 | |||||
Some
old school footage of the F-22 development from 2006! |
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*
Our Friends! *
| Oct 25, 2008 | |||||||||
Nose
Heavy and Vertical Stabilizers: |
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Importance
of Vertical Stabilizers |
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The
key to a stable plane |
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Dihedral
and Anhedral |
Keith's
Plane Extra Footage |
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| Dihedral brings a plane's wings back to center automatically. Its like a self stabilizing feature in the wing design. As the plane rolls to one side, the lower wing starts to get more lift and then brings itself back up. The benefit to this is the airplane is naturally very stable making it easy on the pilot. You will see different types of dihedral on trainer planes or sailplanes. The trade off is, its not very maneuverable, especially when trying to do barrel rolls! There is always a trade off in aerodynamics: The trade off for stability is lack of maneuverability. | |||||||||
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| Anhedral is just the opposite, or dihedral upside-down. You see the wings angled down on most modern-fighter planes and the large C-5 transporter for example. Again this goes back to the trade off of stability = lack of maneuverability OR maneuverability = lack of stability. These guys chose maneuverability as they knowingly give up stability. Thats ok, cause they know what they are doing. | |||||||||
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| What happens when an anhedral planes starts to roll, is the higher wing during a roll starts to get more lift and then wants to roll the plane even more in that direction. So the more it starts to roll the more it wants to roll! Which is just the opposite of dihedral where the more it rolls the more it wants to come back to straight and level and stablize. | |||||||||
| What we learned in this project is not only does dihedral stabilize the roll, it also helps contribute to yaw stabilization as well. I don't fully understand how that works yet but plan to do more experiments on that. We are thinking about putting some slight dihedral on our vertical tailless X-36 to give it some yaw stability in theory. | |||||||||
| - Dave Powers | |||||||||
