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Wing loading is a useful measure of the stalling speed of an aircraft. Wings generate lift owing to the motion of air around the wing. Larger wings move more air, so an aircraft with a large wing area relative to its mass (i.e., low wing loading) will have a lower stalling speed.
Most importantly, the maximum lift-to-drag ratio is independent of the weight of the aircraft, the area of the wing, or the wing loading. It can be shown that two main drivers of maximum lift-to-drag ratio for a fixed wing aircraft are wingspan and total wetted area. One method for estimating the zero-lift drag coefficient of an aircraft is the ...
The thrust-to-weight ratio and lift-to-drag ratio are the two most important parameters in determining the performance of an aircraft. The thrust-to-weight ratio varies continually during a flight. Thrust varies with throttle setting, airspeed, altitude, air temperature, etc. Weight varies with fuel burn and payload changes.
As noted earlier, , =,. The total drag coefficient can be estimated as: = [()], where is the propulsive efficiency, P is engine power in horsepower, sea-level air density in slugs/cubic foot, is the atmospheric density ratio for an altitude other than sea level, S is the aircraft's wing area in square feet, and V is the aircraft's speed in miles per hour.
In the definition of load factor, the lift is not simply that one generated by the aircraft's wing, instead it is the vector sum of the lift generated by the wing, the fuselage and the tailplane, [2]: 395 or in other words it is the component perpendicular to the airflow of the sum of all aerodynamic forces acting on the aircraft.
The position of a swept wing along the fuselage has to be such that the lift from the wing root, well forward of the aircraft center of gravity (c.g.), must be balanced by the wing tip, well aft of the c.g. [68] If the tip stalls first the balance of the aircraft is upset causing dangerous nose pitch up. Swept wings have to incorporate features ...
Induced drag is related to the angle of the induced downwash in the vicinity of the wing. The grey vertical line labeled "L" is the force required to counteract the weight of the aircraft. The red vector labeled "L eff" is the actual lift on the wing; it is perpendicular to the effective relative airflow in the vicinity of the wing. The lift ...
Aircraft use the wing area (or rotor-blade area) as the reference area, which makes for an easy comparison to lift. Airships and bodies of revolution use the volumetric coefficient of drag, in which the reference area is the square of the cube root of the airship's volume. Sometimes different reference areas are given for the same object in ...