Airplane Design

This is the tenth edition (1954) of K.D. Wood's Airplane Design. Despite its age, it is the favorite of amateur aircraft designers, because it sits on the cusp between propeller-driven, low subsonic airplanes, and the huge increase in military performance represented by supersonic and hypersonic aircraft, and in commercial value represented by high-subsonic, jet-propelled airliners. It is also situated inside the early, heroic period of helicopter development, and Wood’s knowledge of that (then)exotic aircraft comes out clearly. He still includes wood as an aircraft material, and geodetic structures and tube trusses as structural arrangements, without neglecting the monocoque and semi-monocoque metal structures that were then becoming more common. He also covers seaplanes and flying boats, a topic essentially ignored today. He recognizes the potential of fiber-reinforced plastics and discusses them to the extent possible at the time. This is the companion volume to K.D. Wood's Technical Aerodynamics, third edition.This improved facsimile reprint has a new, detailed table of contents, accurate pagination and improvements to some of the illustrations.