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By Peter Garrison / Published: Jan 01, 2003 To prevent tip stall, designers have resorted to providing the outboard portions of tapered wings with more cambered airfoil sections, drooped or enlarged leading edges, fixed or automatic leading edge slots or slats, and, most commonly, wing twist or "washout." The trouble with these fixes is that they all increase the drag, canceling whatever benefit the tapered wing was supposed to deliver in the first place. The rectangular wing, on the other hand, naturally tends to stall from the root, because its outer portion, which is capable of producing just as much lift as the root, in fact is called on to produce less because of the natural reduction of loading toward the tip. With a couple of degrees of twist, a rectangular wing closely approaches an elliptical lift distribution and provides impeccable stalling behavior besides. Thorp leaves it at that, but Bergey goes on to recall the history of the Schneider Cup racers in the late '20s and early '30s. Small floatplanes with big engines, the racers were the precursors of the fast fighters of World War II. They started off with various kinds of tapered and semi-elliptical wings, but Bergey notes that the Macchi M.C.72, which set an unsurpassed seaplane speed record of 383 knots in 1935, had an untapered wing. Although Bergey's and Thorp's analyses of rectangular and tapered wings are similar, their purposes are different. Bergey wants to make

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3D e%Thorp, the point that nothing is gained by tapering a wing, least of all speed, and that the Cherokee's rectangular wing is perfectly suitable for a high-speed airplane.

whose comments were addressed principally to homebuilders, wanted to show not only that wing taper gains nothing, but that it is actually likely to have an adverse /_images/200910 252 0% effect on performance. He points out, at the same time, the great advantage, from the point of view of a homebuilder (or for that matter any manufacturer) of a wing C2 252 /PeterGf.jpg) many of whose ribs are interchangeable. In somewhat the spirit of H. L. Mencken, who, no beauty himself, suggested, as a gesture that would gratify him posthumously, that men at a homely girl, Bergey closes with the following advice:
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"When you walk past a Cherokee or an RV or any of the thousands of general aviation aircraft with Hershey Bar wings, flash them a friendly smile. Let them know you appreciate the high cruise efficiency of their almost ideal spanwise lift distributions. ?And their forgiving stall characteristics."
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