Quantitative Prediction of the Idealized Performance of Aircraft with Outboard-Horizontal Stabilizers

摘要

An outboard-horizontal-stabilizer aircraft configuration is one in which the horizontal and vertical tail surfaces are supported by booms projecting downwind from each wing tip of a monoplane such that these surfaces lie within the up wash and inwash flow generated by each wing tip. The horizontal surfaces project, therefore, outboard of each wing tip, with a vertical surface mounted above each boom. A description is given of the inherent advantage of an outboard-horizontal-stabilizer configuration. A theoretical treatment, closely based on fundamental concepts, is presented that is designed to facilitate the evaluation of the net drag of an outboard-horizontal-stabilizer configuration in terms of the wing-lift coefficient of an equivalent conventional configuration of equal lift. The theoretical treatment is applied to several outboard-horizontal-stabilizer-type configurations to evaluate flight performance in terms of lift/drag versus wing-lift coefficient. These performances are compared with the idealized performances of equivalent conventional configurations. It was found that, depending upon the details of the basis of the comparison, the outboard-horizontal-stabilizer configurations were from 30 to 50 % more efficient in terms of lift/ drag than their conventional alternatives.