9

Drag Estimation

Abstract

Sources of airplane drag are introduced. Skin friction and form drag in laminar and turbulent flow, compressibility, and surface roughness effects on skin friction, and the equivalent flat plate method for calculating component drag are described. Drag estimation of major components according to common practice is presented, including wing and tail drag, effect of boundary layer transition on wing and tail drag, fuselage drag, nacelle and pylon drag, landing gear drag, flap drag, and other drag sources. Compressibility effects on drag at high subsonic and low transonic speeds and the area rule are discussed and methods for estimating wave drag coefficients are presented and compared. Sweepback corrections for these ...

Get Commercial Airplane Design Principles now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.