Slowdown for Jets

When an airplane flies, it gets its lift because air traveling over the curved top surface of its wing must go faster, thus exerting less pressure, than air moving across the bottom surface. The more speed, the greater difference in pressure, and the greater the lift. But when flying speed is lost, the pressure difference diminishes, lift-destroying eddies build up over the wing, and the plane stalls.

Last week Lockheed Aircraft Corp. reported a new device that enables aircraft to fly at lower speeds without stalling. Now being built into a mass-produced Navy jet trainer, the T2-V-1, the new wrinkle is relatively simple: highly compressed air is piped from the Allison J33 engine through a tube running inside the rear edge of each wing. Through slots in the tube, the air rushes to the rear and down over the wing flaps and ailerons, thus assuring a flow without eddies and giving more of what aerodynamicists call Boundary Layer Control. With the added lift at lower speeds. Navy jet pilots can take off from shorter (by 50%) airstrips, make slower, safer landings on an aircraft carrier's pitching flight deck.

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