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Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk
notwrong writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a Qantas engineer has found a way to help small aircraft avoid stalling at low speeds: pumping sound through the wings. He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead (nice choices; Spiderbait apparently works better)."
I'm shocked that it isn't Radiohead that comes out on top. After all, they have the greatest rock album of the last 20 years, remember (according to Rolling Stone).
Of course, every RH song sounds like every other RH song, but what do trendy white college kids know.
I've seen this troll before...
is he the one with the +5 smack the shit out of one's own karma hammer?? because if it is...
:)
HE STOLE IT FROM ME
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Very funny. Any roughly rectangular wing will stall from the inside out. It's only when the wing is tapered more strongly than an ellipse that you risk stalling at the tips first. To further minimize the risk of the tips stalling, the wingtips are usually angled down (washed out) a couple degrees (compared to the rest of the wing) or they incorporate a different airfoil at the tip that stalls a few degrees later.
What would happen if a single speaker went out? Would the plane go into an irrecoverable barrel roll?
You could easily prevent just one speaker from going out at a time by wiring opposing panels in series.
What would happen is the plane would revert to its old dynamics. The five degrees past normal stall AOA mentioned in the article would put you into a fairly deep stall, but if your plane was otherwise properly designed, you'd still have authoritative rudder control, certainly enough to keep any yaw momentum down until you can nose the plane over.
Also, stalls really aren't that big a deal if you know your ass from a hole in the ground.
Many pilots have stalled a wingtip on their landing approach by banking too tightly to make a turn, while trying to maintain altitude, while going too slowly for the wings to generate the extra lift required for that maneuver. Because one wing is already moving slower than the other, it generally puts you in a spin that you won't have altitude to recover from. You could say those pilots don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, but at that point it really is a matter of semantics.
Why are you, as a pilot of a certified aircraft, worried about new things, anyway? You might as well own a car in Cuba.