<< Page 1 Page 2: Page 3 >>   About This Website Purpose The goal of this site is to provide a simple-to-understand resource about airplane design. I hope to satisfy people’s curiosity about why airplanes are designed the way they are, and to present this information in a way that a high-schooler could understand. Every last feature of an airplane is put there very deliberately and very carefully, by engineers who understand that doing it a certain way causes an optimal increase in performance. So, why do fighter jets look so different from Cessnas, which look so different from airliners? Why do all airliners look the same? Why does the Space Shuttle look so different from a sailplane, which looks so different from a hang-glider, even though they are all gliders? Why were most early airplanes biplanes, and why is this configuration so rare today? Why are some airplanes propeller-powered while others are jet-powered? Why do stealth airplanes look so weird? Why do some airplanes have straight wings while others have swept wings? When was each of these design features invented? This site aims to answer these questions. If you were to read this site all the way through, you would end up being able to just look at an airplane, and from its design infer things like its cruise speed, range, maximum altitude, age, and possible uses. Copyright information The material on this website is released through a Creative Commons license. Specifically, an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. This means that I own the copyright to all this material, but I grant you permission to incorporate my material into your work/project, without asking me, as long as - you give me credit, - you aren’t making money directly off of your work/project, and - you release your work/project under a Creative Commons license with these same terms. If you do wish to use this material in a way that does not follow the above conditions (i.e. you wish to use my material and to make money from your work/project, to not release your work/project under a CC license, and/or to not give me credit), then you simply have to ask me permission. I’m a reasonable person, we can probably work something out. And while the CC license means you don’t have to let me know if you use my material (as long as you follow the restrictions defined in the license), I would still love it if you did let me know. You don’t have to, but it would be really appreciated. I put a ton of work into this site, and it would be very rewarding to know that this material is being used out there by someone for a good cause and/or as part of a neat creative project. I have written all the text on this website. I have also photographed or drawn most of the images on this website. Of the images I did not create, most of them are in the public domain, having been made by NASA, the US armed forces, the Russian aircraft design bureaus, etc. The remaining pictures were taken by professional photographers, whom I contacted individually and asked permission to include their images on this project. So, yes, I am not violating anyone’s rights by releasing this material with a Creative Commons license. The origin of this website Where did all this material come from? Why did I write it? Well, I wrote it because I was writing a textbook for a class. But let me start from the beginning. During my junior year at Stanford (I hate how pretentious sentences like this sound, but bear with me), I learned about the Stanford High-school Enrichment Program. That’s where we take high-schoolers and centrifugally separate out the most radioactive… no, no, that’s not it at all. “SHEP”, as we call it, is this AWESOME program where an undergrad could design a course and teach it to high schoolers. The course could be taught over five two-hour classes, and be about pretty much anything. The SHEP program organizers would do all the “marketing”, contacting 50 schools in the Bay Area and taking care of the registration process, making sure the kids knew about what classes were going on. All I had to do was plan a class and teach it. It sounded almost too good to be true. I love teaching, and I love talking about airplanes. I love it when I help people appreciate how cool and intricate the technology around them is. You mean I can spend TEN HOURS talking to high schoolers about airplanes?! That’s AWESOME! And indeed it was awesome. I got nine really great and smart kids, and I planned five interesting, diverse, and quite action packed lectures. We flew my radio-controlled flying wing, flew simulators, and talked about all kinds of airplanes and airplane-related stuff. Few things I have done in my time at Stanford were this interesting, this fun, or this rewarding. The fall after that (senior year), I learned that undergraduates could create and TEACH courses at Stanford! I had heard of Student-Initiated Courses before, but as far as I knew, they involved students working together with faculty to “create” a course that the faculty member would teach. Apparently, some departments made it easy for STUDENTS to teach one- or two-credit courses, especially if those students had gone through the teaching and curriculum-planning workshops put on by the Student-Initiated Course organization at Stanford. And as for the departments that did NOT make this so easy (i.e. the techie ones), faculty members could still teach independent research courses/workshops/seminars. So I would be good to go if I could persuade a member of the faculty that my high-school course would, after some changes, make a good Mechanical Engineering course, and that I would be good at teaching it. My advisor was surprisingly impressed by how much preparation I had put into this course, and at how full of cool stuff it was, so he backed me up and allowed me to make it happen as a Stanford course. Part of the reason that he was so impressed is that I wrote a 170-page book about all the tings I talked about in the class. After the course was over, I was quite unhappy about the fact that this book was sitting on my shelf instead of getting read by people who might enjoy learning from it. So I decided to put it all online. I have also written an addendum to the book, about stuff I find interesting but which I did not have time to talk about in my class. Since I wanted to give my students an overview of how aeronautical technologies have evolved, it would not be worthwhile to spend much time talking about VTOL technology or stealth technology, since the impact of these developments on mainstream aviation has been minimal. However, I do know a lot about those technologies, I think they involve some extremely clever engineering, and I did get asked about them in class, so I have written an addendum to my book about those technologies, among some other things. The course was taught in 2003, and since then we have seen SpaceShip One (the first spacecraft not funded by a government) win the X-Prize, the X-43 (the first working scramjet) be the first airplane to fly at MACH 10, the Airbus A380 (the largest airliner ever built) take to the skies, among other developments. So I wanted to keep my material up-to-date, another reason to write that addendum. The contents of my book and of the addendum, as well as the videos I showed in class and some more random stuff, is the material you can now see in this website. (Or, rather, what you will soon be able to see on this website. It's still under construction). That book can be downloaded here, and the addendum can be downloaded here. And if you’re curious, the course description is still up on the Stanford intranet, and I still have the SPLASH course catalogue that featured my Gliders Workshop. Ah, right, last but not least: The "gliders" activity was planned when I had the opportunity to lead an after-school-program for one afternoon, helping some 6th-graders through an activity. I figured that the most important things about how an airplane is designed can be very well communicated by having kids build a glider. The kids are motivated to learn these things if their gliders then compete, and the lessons are memorable since the kids get to have fun, make something, and keep it. (What better way of learning science and math than designing and making something). So I designed the activity, and led it in a middle school in San Francisco, in their after-school program. Later, I led the activity again with high schoolers at “SPLASH”, a one-day high-school enrichment program organized by the same people behind SHEP (the program for which I wrote the aviation technology course to begin with). “SPLASH” is organized just like SHEP, with the organizers going to local high schools to try to find kids who want to take the one-day courses, while all I had to do was prepare the materials and show up. Both times were fun, and I think I ended up with a package that can be used by anyone to teach some kids some really important fundamentals of airplane design. So that’s where all this material came from. I hereby release it into the internet for the benefit of mankind! I do hope you enjoy it. And remember – any questions, comments, criticism, suggestions, or if you just want to say “Hi”; Please email me! Valeu! - Bernardo