Grumman X-29
I have chosen to do my book report on the book "The Grumman X-29", by
Steve
Pace, for a couple of reasons. I’ve seen the X-29 in flight at an air
show and
was mystified by its wing design. I asked myself how could something
like that
fly at all? This book shed some light on the mysteries of how the
X-29 flies and
performs. I am going to tell you a little about the book and
the X-29, so sit
back relax and enjoy the fruits of my reading labor. The
X-29 is a single-engine
aircraft 48.1 feet long. Its forward-swept wing has a
span of 27.2 feet. Each
X-29 was powered by a General Electric
F404-GE-400 engine producing 16,000
pounds of thrust. Empty weight was 13,600
pounds, while takeoff weight was
17,600 pounds. The wing substructure and
the basic airframe itself are aluminum
and titanium. Wing trailing edge
actuators controlling camber are mounted
externally in streamlined fairings
because of the thinness of the supercritical
airfoil. The aircraft had a
maximum operating altitude of 50,000 feet, a maximum
speed of Mach 1.6, and a
flight endurance time of approximately one hour.
Overall, VFC, like the
forward-swept wings, showed promise for the future of
aircraft design. The
X-29 did not demonstrate the overall reduction in
aerodynamic drag that
earlier studies had suggested, but this discovery should
not be interpreted
to mean that a more optimized design with forward-swept wings
could not yield
a reduction in drag. Overall, the X-29 program demonstrated
several new
technologies as well as new uses of proven technologies. These
included: aero
elastic tailoring to control structural divergence; use of a
relatively
large, close-coupled canard for longitudinal control; control of an
aircraft
with extreme instability while still providing good handling qualities;
use
of three-surface longitudinal control; use of a double-hinged
trailing-edge
flap at supersonic speeds; control effectiveness at high angle
of attack; vortex
control; and military utility of the overall design. The
book was overall very
informative in the sense that all terms and ideas were
explained clearly and
simply in order to communicate to the general public
better versus someone who
is educated in the aeronautics field. I highly
recommend this book to someone
looking for a little overall knowledge of the
X-29, but if you are looking for
in-depth report and analysis you should look
elsewhere.
Bibliography
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Document number: FS-98-04-008 DFRC
Responsible NASA Official: Jenny
Baer-Riedhart http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/PAO/PAIS/HTML/FS-008-DFRC.html