Originally posted by Aloysius the Gaul
The area rule is applied everywhere - I think you are confusing 1 particular shape of a fuselage for the rule - the "wasp waist" is NOT the only
fuselage shape that can be used when an aircraft is "area ruled".
The sole requirement of the area rule is that the cross section of the total airframe (including any external stores) changes as smoothly as possible
- it does not matter whethe thesse changes are in the fuselage, the wing, or any odd bumps and lumps that might be incorporated to achieve it.
there's a good article on how area rules can be applied without a wasp waist at www.aerospaceweb.org...
If the Arrow was not area ruled is probably wouldn't even have gotten to Mach 1.5!
Since I am a retired educator my knowledge of the area rule comes from books and I do not like online sources because they are often incorrect and
some change every day.
The area rule was a discovery of a fellow called Whitcomb at NACA that it was necessary to consider the cross sectional area of the wings and other
protrusions when trying to make the aircraft conform to the shape of a stretched-out American football. The rule is generally applied to a greater or
lesser degree and from nose to tail. No aircraft I know of follows the rule 100% and the example given shows that the F-102 did not completely
conform to the rule either.
A wasp waist is one solution to the problem for a particular wing shape. The Starfighter was area ruled to a large extent but it did not have a wasp
waist but then it wasn't a "delta" either. The Arrow was also area ruled to a degree but the Delta Dart's shape followed the rule to a greater
exent which gave less drag. Several other faster aircraft also followed the area rule to a greater degree than the Arrow did.
The site you mentioned does illustrate how the F-102A conforms to the desired shape to a greater degree than the YF-102A. Avro did not apply the
rule at the waist and that part of the aircraft still had too much drag. The Arrow was built and tested with dummy weights in place of unfinished
subsytems. The maximum continous operating speed is recorded as Mach 1.9 but the aircraft could "dash" to Mach 2.0 and possibly beyond. Since the
maximum speed was determined by skin temperature it would have been the same for the Mk.2 but different for the Mk. 3. Orenda was planning to
optimize the Iroquois for Mach 1.5 to try and increase range so the later Arrows would have been slower than the first ones.
Even though the Arrow was not the fastest aircraft at the time it was still fast enough to meet the specification which was a maximum continuous speed
of Mach 1.5. It was the 1254 nm ferry range that did not meet the specification and the RCAF had advised Avro that the range was "not acceptable".
Originally posted by waynos
Also, the Arrow was very far from being the Turkey that Murray seems to think.
It is not just what I think. Aerospace Engineering Professor Julius Lukasiewicz who was familiar with the Arrow described it by saying, “It wasn’t
an exceptionally wonderful plane. It was a big plane but it was essentially a plane that could have been built and...designed and built, on the basis
of data available at that time and many aircraft were like this. There was nothing extraordinary about it.”
A video containing his words is posted at
www.youtube.com...
Records show that the Americans cited the short range as a reason for not buying the Arrow but, so far, I have been unable to discover why the U.K.
declined to buy it. Perhaps we can discover the U.K.'s reason by comparing notes.
Now, are you saying the U.K. bought no interceptors because of the white paper or that that they had other interceptors?
What I think is really unfair is that Canadian governments over the years have spent millions of our tax dollars teaching young people that President
Eisenhower murdered our unicorn when we never even had a bleeding unicorn. What we actually had was an overestimated, overpriced, giant, flying,
white, "Turkey".
