Dan Raymer's book "Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach" is the textbook for many aircraft design capstone undergraduate courses.  It covers almost all aspects of conceptual design, including initial sizing, configuration layout, aerodynamics, propulsion, stability & control, mass properties, and structures and materials. The notes appended here provide some cross-references and annotations.

Characteristics of the standard atmosphere are listed in Appendix B.  However, a procedure for calculating the characteristics of the atmosphere at an arbitrary altitude is not described in the book.  If a spreadsheet is used to simulate the mission, a knowledge of pressure, density, temperature and the speed of sound is essential for mission analysis.  A description of the atmosphere up to the top of the stratosphere (about 65,600 ft), can be found here, along with an accompanying Excel spreadsheet.  There are also websites where the calculations can be performed, such as http://www.digitaldutch.com/atmoscalc/.

Raymer's website (www.aircraftdesign.com) also contains a cornucopia of useful information, plus links to other websites.

Key Benefits

Terminology

These annotations use the same terminology as for Raymer's text, with a few exceptions.  There is one particular area where Raymer's definitions can (and do) cause some confusion with students.  This area is the terminology of components of drag due to lift.  Raymer defines drag due to lift and induced drag as being one and the same thing.  On page 307 he states that "Drag forces that are a strong function of lift are known as induced drag or drag due to lift".  However, McCormick (p.186) makes the observation that "Strictly speaking, this definition of C_Di {induced drag] is not correct.  Although it has become practice to charge to C_Di any drag increase associated with C_L, some of this increase results from the dependency of the parasite drag on the angle of attack.  What, then, is a more precise definition of C_Di?  Very simply, the induced drag at a given C_L can be defined as the drag that the wing would experience in an inviscid flow at the same C_L."  This is a good enough definition, ignoring for a moment the problem that a wing could experience neither lift nor drag in an inviscid flow because the Kutta condition at the trailing edge would not be met.

These annotations more closely follow the definitions in Nicolai (pp. 11-7 to 11-9), in which drag due to lift is broken down into two parts:

Organization

Annotations are organized by chapter and section, following Raymer's numbering system and section titles.  Not all sections are annotated.  Within each annotation both figures and equations are numbered by chapter and section [e.g. Eq. (17.2.3)], rather than just by chapter (as in Raymer), so that they will be differentiated from Raymer's figures and equations.  Click on a link below to go to the annotation for that section.  Linked section annotations are in portable document format (pdf). Additional notes are supplied here that provide links to other webs.

References

In these annotations, references will usually be described by author.  Some references are provided at the end of the section:

Hoerner                        Hoerner, S.F., "Fluid-Dynamic Drag", Hoerner Fluid Dynamics, 1965.

Lan & Roskam                Lan, C-T. E., and Roskam, J., "Airplane Aerodynamics and Performance, First Edition", The University of Kansas, 1980. Note: A second edition has been published.        

McCormick                    McCormick, B. W., "Aerodynamics, Aeronautics, and Flight Dynamics", John Wiley & Sons, 1979.

Nicolai                          Nicolai, L., "Fundamentals of Aircraft Design", METS Inc, 1975.

Shevell                         Shevell, R., "Fundamentals of Flight, Second Edition", Prentice Hall, 1983.

Torenbeek                    Torenbeek, E., "Synthesis of Subsonic Airplane Design", Delft University Press, 1982. 

All of these books (and more listed in the bibliography to this website) should be owned by an aspiring aircraft designer.

References will also be made to the Federal Aviation Regulations (officially known as 14 CFR, or Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations).  Before this information was available online, an up-to-date copy could be found in every aerodynamics and performance department.  Make sure that you are viewing the FARs from the US Government website.  Other websites have copies, but they may not be current. 

Send mail to ahays@alum.mit.edu with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 04/25/10