Word: airflow
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...provide lift.* When the plane reaches about 80% of the speed of sound, however, the velocity of the air flowing over the upper side of the wing reaches the sonic barrier. A shock wave forms about half way back from the wing's leading edge, disturbing the airflow and increasing drag-the resistance of air to the plane's passage...
...efforts to reduce turbulence, Whitcomb finally hit upon the design for what NASA now calls the "supercritical wing." To reduce the peak airflow speed and move the shock wave farther back on the wing, he drastically flattened the curvature of the upper wing surface. To compensate for the loss of lift that resulted, he increased the curvature near the wing's trailing edge and put a concave contour on the underside. "Some people think that I merely turned the wing upside down," Whitcomb says...
...boxy appearance. Coming in for the biggest changes at Chevrolet is the Corvette. Rakishly restyled, with a body 7 in. longer than present models', the '68 Corvette has high-backed seats, hideaway windshield wipers and jet-age gizmos like the "spoiler"-a raised airflow deflector that adds a decorative touch to the rear deck, also helps reduce the danger of spin-outs at high speeds...
Perfect Maze. The solution, surprisingly, has long been obvious. But while engineers knew that the laminar (smooth) airflow they wanted could be had by sucking any turbulent air into a wing's inner cavity, putting theory into practice proved a stubborn puzzle. Dr. Pfenninger worked on his LFC (laminar flow control) wing for 23 years before perfecting its closely packed slits that are only a few thousandths of an inch wide. Under each slit, a small chamber gathers the incoming air and channels it through pin-size holes into ducts that lead to streamlined nacelles hanging under each wing...
Most of the pilots were scientists-chiefly meteorologists, electronics engineers, aerodynamicists-who devoted their spare time and their rainy hours to such pursuits as lectures by Geophysicist Joachim Kuettner on "A New Investigation of Stratospheric and Tropospheric Airflow in Powerful Mountain Waves," or "Research on the Transport of Freezing Nuclei and on Atmospheric Turbulence by Means of a Sailplane...