Publication Date
4-1-2025
Abstract
In historically first planes, wings were orthogonal to the fuselage. However, later it turned out that from the aerodynamic viewpoint, it is most efficient to place the wings at about 37 degrees from this orthogonal direction -- and this is where wings are placed in most modern planes. There exist theoretical explanations for this optimality -- explanations based on solving the equations of aerodynamics. In such situations when only a complex not-very-intuitive explanation exists, it is desirable to come up with a simpler more intuitive explanation. For the wing angles, such an explanation is provided in this paper. Namely, we show that, somewhat surprisingly, this is all related to the so-called Egyptian triangle -- a right triangle with sides 3, 4, and 5. The name for this triangle comes from the fact that already the ancient Egyptians were very familiar with this triangle -- they used it to accurately reproduce the right angle.
Comments
Technical Report: UTEP-CS-25-12