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In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Henry Spencer) writes: |
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>In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Pat) writes: |
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|>I thought the area rule was pioneered by Boeing. |
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|>NASA guys developed the rule, but no-one knew if it worked |
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|>until Boeing built the hardware 727 and maybe the FB-111????? |
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|Nope. The decisive triumph of the area rule was when Convair's YF-102 -- |
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|contractually commmitted to being a Mach 1.5 fighter and actually found |
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|to be incapable of going supersonic in level flight -- was turned into |
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|the area-ruled YF-102A which met the specs. This was well before either |
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|the 727 or the FB-111; the 102 flew in late 1953, and Convair spent most |
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|of the first half of 1954 figuring out what went wrong and most of the |
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|second half building the first 102A. |
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|All work is one man's work. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology |
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| - Kipling | [email protected] utzoo!henry |
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Good thing i stuck in a couple of question marks up there. |
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I seem to recall, somebody built or at least proposed a wasp waisetd |
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Passenger civil transport. I thought it was a 727, but maybe it |
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was a DC- 8,9??? Sure it had a funny passenger compartment, |
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but on the other hand it seemed to save fuel. |
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I thought Area rules applied even before transonic speeds, just |
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not as badly. |
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pat |
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