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Supercritical airfoils feature four main benefits: they have a higher drag-divergence Mach number, [21] they develop shock waves farther aft than traditional airfoils, [22] they greatly reduce shock-induced boundary layer separation, and their geometry allows more efficient wing design (e.g., a thicker wing and/or reduced wing sweep, each of which may allow a lighter wing).
Two of the important technological advancements that arose out of attempts to conquer the sound barrier were the Whitcomb area rule and the supercritical airfoil. A supercritical airfoil is shaped specifically to make the drag-divergence Mach number as high as possible, allowing aircraft to fly with relatively lower drag at high subsonic and ...
Using this method, supercritical wings were fabricated and proven on full-scale aircraft; in 1971 a Vought F-8 Crusader, and in 1973 a General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, were flown at the NASA Flight Research Center in California. For his contribution, NASA awarded Whitcomb a $25,000 prize, and he received the 1974 Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy ...
Supercritical airfoils designed to independently maximize laminar flow above and below the wing. The numbering is identical to the 7-series airfoils except that the sequence begins with an "8" to identify the series.
An aircraft with wings using a cambered airfoil will have a lower stalling speed than an aircraft with a similar wing loading and wings using a symmetric airfoil. One recent cambered design is called the supercritical airfoil .
The supercritical airfoil is a type that results in reasonable low speed lift like a normal airfoil, but has a profile considerably closer to that of the von Kármán ogive. All modern civil airliners use forms of supercritical aerofoil and have substantial supersonic flow over the wing upper surface.
The natural outcome of this requirement is a wing design that is thin and wide, which has a low thickness-to-chord ratio. At lower speeds, undesirable parasitic drag is largely a function of the total surface area, which suggests using a wing with minimum chord, leading to the high aspect ratios seen on light aircraft and regional airliners ...
The Convair 990 had bumps called antishock bodies added to the top surface of the wing with the intent of achieving the required cruise speed. However, the area distribution in the channels formed by the nacelle/pylon/wing surfaces also caused supersonic velocities and was the source of significant drag.