PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Degree of Sweepback?
View Single Post
Old 14th December 2008 | 19:37
  #14 (permalink)  
keith smith
 
Joined: May 2008
Posts: 49
Likes: 0
From: Windsor CA 95492
Choosing sweep angle for commercial/business jets is a compromise between critical mach number and maximum lift coefficient. Increasing sweep increases the former (allowing increased cruise speed) but decreases the latter, resulting in worse field performance. So it is not surprising that short range aircraft generally have less sweep than long range ones, because high cruise spped is less important than field performance.
Very high sweep combined with high aspect ratio can produce serious structural problems like wing divergance(bending moment causing increased incidence at tip)

Keith
keith smith is offline  
Reply