Originally Posted by
WHBM
It was always accepted that it should have had a forward fuselage plug to balance it.
That may or may not be true, but CG position has no effect on flying attitude. The fuselage attitude is set almost entirely by justthe wing incidence - the angle at which the wings are nailed to the fuselage. The CG position would affect how hard the tailplane has to work to hold the wing in that attitude, but not the attitude itself.
FWIW I understand that on transport aircraft (and indeed any aircraft designed for long periods of straight&level cruising) the wing incidence is chosen such that the rear fuselage is aligned to the airflow to reduce drag, and the airflow has significant downwash aft of the wings as a result of generating all that lift. Thus the aeroplane "sits" nose-up. This does mean that the forward fuselage has a significant angle of attack, but the drag produced by that is less than the drag that would be produced by the rear fuselage if flown with the fuselage in a level attitude. Obviously as the fuel is burned off the required wing AoA reduces, and that's why for VERY long ranges the optimum approach is to cruise-climb so that the required AoA increases at the same rate as the fuel-burn decreases it (if you see what I mean).
Someone mentioned using fuselage lift as a contribution to the overall lift - actually you don't want to do this. The reason is simply that the fuselage is very bad at developing lift because it has such a tiny aspect ratio. So each pound of lift (on old money) that you get from the fuselage produces about 30 times the induced drag that you'd get by developing the same amount of lift from the wings. So you really, really want the fuselage to be as close as possible to zero lift coefficient, and that could also be why the wing incidence is chosen to get zero AoA on as much of the fuselage as possible in the cruise.
PDR