37 ms·

An interesting fact is that Concorde had a similar inversion in its drag curve where as it slowed down the amount of drag increased meaning you had to throttle

An interesting fact is that Concorde had a similar inversion in its drag curve where as it slowed down the amount of drag increased meaning you had to throttle up to maintain the same speed. In Concorde's case this was caused by the massive delta wing which created huge vortices at high angles of attack which allowed it to fly at reasonably low speeds (high compared to normal airliners but manageable) while having suitably low drag to fly at 2.5 times the speed of sound.

VLM 13y ago
Almost all aircraft have a "slow flight mode" (google for it) like that at a high angle of attack. I'd say all, but its probably only 99.9% and someone would bring up the X-3 perhaps confusing its pitch-roll coupling with slow flight or something weird like that. The stall angle of attack usually is not coincident with peak lift to drag ratio. In fact I'm not even sure you can FAA certify an airframe where peak L/D AoA is ever at stall AoA at any airspeed, they'd probably totally freak out about spin susceptibility, or at least I certainly would. So you have an engine failure and automatically by training go into best AoA flight mode, with that design any turning or even a little wind gust or whatever would probably mean a possibly unrecoverable spin, which would kinda suck. I mean I think you could theoretically design a wing airfoil that way, and physically build it, but you'd get flamed pretty severely about it. I think this would also make takeoffs and landings overly unstable/exciting. Airframes traditionally have pretty cruddy maneuverability/performance at stall AoAs although you could probably fix that (lots of exotic jet fighters do pretty well under those flight conditions, then again they aren't "most planes"...) Also you're going to get pilots and CFIs all wound up, by trying to talk about using throttle to control speed, at least theoretically to reduce pilot induced oscillations you'll formally be told that AoA should be used to control airspeed and throttle should be used to control rate of climb (aka altitude, in the calculus integrated sense). A smooth experienced pilot makes it very hard visually to tell exactly which control input at which time is having what effect, but at least in theory this is what you'll be trained at least for major flight maneuvers, in practice very small scale triming / autopilot is usually the other way around as you describe, or so it seems. And those "in between" adjustments make a formal definition kinda complicated, or meaningless. Piloting is a very hands on experience, so its like trying to teach someone gymnastics by writing articles.

VLM 13y ago

Almost all aircraft have a "slow flight mode" (google for it) like that at a high angle of attack. I'd say all, but its probably only 99.9% and someone would bring up the X-3 perhaps confusing its pitch-roll coupling with slow flight or something weird like that. The stall angle of attack usually is not coincident with peak lift to drag ratio. In fact I'm not even sure you can FAA certify an airframe where peak L/D AoA is ever at stall AoA at any airspeed, they'd probably totally freak out about spin susceptibility, or at least I certainly would. So you have an engine failure and automatically by training go into best AoA flight mode, with that design any turning or even a little wind gust or whatever would probably mean a possibly unrecoverable spin, which would kinda suck. I mean I think you could theoretically design a wing airfoil that way, and physically build it, but you'd get flamed pretty severely about it. I think this would also make takeoffs and landings overly unstable/exciting. Airframes traditionally have pretty cruddy maneuverability/performance at stall AoAs although you could probably fix that (lots of exotic jet fighters do pretty well under those flight conditions, then again they aren't "most planes"...) Also you're going to get pilots and CFIs all wound up, by trying to talk about using throttle to control speed, at least theoretically to reduce pilot induced oscillations you'll formally be told that AoA should be used to control airspeed and throttle should be used to control rate of climb (aka altitude, in the calculus integrated sense). A smooth experienced pilot makes it very hard visually to tell exactly which control input at which time is having what effect, but at least in theory this is what you'll be trained at least for major flight maneuvers, in practice very small scale triming / autopilot is usually the other way around as you describe, or so it seems. And those "in between" adjustments make a formal definition kinda complicated, or meaningless. Piloting is a very hands on experience, so its like trying to teach someone gymnastics by writing articles.