I'm doing a science project for school and i need to know what the best wing design for an airplane is.

From : Don Stackhouse

Simple question, but no simple answer. A quick look at any good book on airplanes, or a visit to your local airport, will show you a wide variety of wing designs. Even the ones that look similar to each other may turn out to have many important differences when you start looking at the details. Yet, it's a safe bet that each of the designers of those different airplanes wanted to have the very best wing design for the airplane he or she was working on.

The problem is that wings are like shoes. It's important that a shoe is designed well, but even more important is that it fits your foot properly. Likewise, the best wing design depends on what you want to do with the airplane that the wing goes on.

There are some general criteria, which are complex enough to fill many books, but the real starting point for all of that is what the airplane you're designing the wing for is supposed to do.

Start with the "mission profile", which is just a fancy term for the job the airplane is supposed to do. From there you can define in general how big the airplane needs to be, and what sort of altitudes, airspeeds, etc. it will be flying at. From there you can define about how big the wing needs to be, and start defining a little about what it should look like.

After some more work on the details of the rest of the plane, you can go back and take another look at the wing design, refine it a little, then go back to refining the rest of the plane again. The design process keeps hopping back and forth like that, until you reach a final conclusion where all the different parts, including the wing, are working together as an efficient team.

I hope that helps a little. It's tough to get too much more specific than that, without getting some more specifics on a particular aircraft design that you're interested in. If you can come up with a reasonable mission profile for an example airplane, then we can get into finer details.

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech