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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.
All fixed-wing aircraft have a minimum speed at which they can maintain level flight, the stall speed (left limit line in the diagram). As the aircraft gains altitude the stall speed increases; since the wing is not growing any larger the only way to support the aircraft's weight with less air is to increase speed.
While internal wing structure commonly provides much of the strength via a combination of spars, ribs and stringers, the external skin typically carries a proportion of the loads too. On many aircraft, the inner volume of the wingbox has also been used to store fuel, which is commonly referred to as being a wet wing design.
The wing is designed so that the angle of incidence is greater at the wing roots and decreases across the span, becoming lowest at the wing tip. This is usually to ensure that at stall speed the wing root stalls before the wing tips , providing the aircraft with continued aileron control and some resistance to spinning .
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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 ...
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The most common high-lift device is the flap, a movable portion of the wing that can be lowered to produce extra lift. When a flap is lowered this re-shapes the wing section to give it more camber. Flaps are usually located on the trailing edge of a wing, while leading edge flaps are used occasionally. There are many kinds of trailing-edge flap.