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To: Dysart; zeebee; tanknetter

“Do you know why the wings were shaped that way?”

The F4U incorporated the largest engine available at the time, the 2,000 hp (1,490 kW) 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial. To extract as much power as possible, a relatively large, 13 ft, 4 inch (4.06 m) Hamilton Standard Hydromatic three-blade propeller was used. To accommodate a folding wing, the designers considered retracting the main landing gear rearward, but for the chord of wing selected, it was difficult to fit undercarriage struts long enough to provide sufficient clearance for the large propeller. Their solution was an inverted gull wing, a similar layout to the one used by Germany’s Stuka dive bomber, considerably shortening the length of the main gear legs. The anhedral of the wing’s center-section also permitted the wing and fuselage to meet at the optimum angle for minimizing drag, without the need for wing root fairings.


97 posted on 01/25/2009 6:56:04 PM PST by GGpaX4DumpedTea
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To: GGpaX4DumpedTea
Nice perspective here of the Stuka dive bomber

You can see the resemblance but the angle slopes upward closer to the fuselage on this one.

99 posted on 01/25/2009 7:16:37 PM PST by Dysart (Democracy is a theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard)
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