Quote:
|
Americans seem to have the knack of being able to adapt and make do with what was commonly available.
|
The information is not a dig or judgement. It is just a fact. The RAE, TSAGI, NACA, and everyone else put airplanes in the sky that flew.
I could share a modern fluid computation analysis of the P51D done by a team of engineers working on Strega for the unlimited racing category.
It is obvious how far our understanding has come when they start comparing data from the 1940's. Their understanding of incompressible aerodynamics was at the pinnacle of that field but compressible aerodynamics was a new frontier.
You see things like wind tunnel boundary layer interference corrections non-existant or wrong curve, data points that do not exhibit the correct characteristics of valid data, and so on and so forth. It does not mean that they were useless or stupid. It just means progress has occurred.
One day, men will look back upon our mighty works and think, "How Primitive they were...."