Grumman X29 By Pace Essay Research Paper

I have chosen to do my book report on the book ?The Grumman X-29?, by Steve

Pace, for a couple of reasons. I?ve seen the X-29 in flight at an air show and

was mystified by its wing design. I asked myself how could something like that

fly at all? This book shed some light on the mysteries of how the X-29 flies and

performs. I am going to tell you a little about the book and the X-29, so sit

back relax and enjoy the fruits of my reading labor. The X-29 is a single-engine

aircraft 48.1 feet long. Its forward-swept wing has a span of 27.2 feet. Each

X-29 was powered by a General Electric F404-GE-400 engine producing 16,000

pounds of thrust. Empty weight was 13,600 pounds, while takeoff weight was

17,600 pounds. The wing substructure and the basic airframe itself are aluminum

and titanium. Wing trailing edge actuators controlling camber are mounted

externally in streamlined fairings because of the thinness of the supercritical

airfoil. The aircraft had a maximum operating altitude of 50,000 feet, a maximum

speed of Mach 1.6, and a flight endurance time of approximately one hour.

Overall, VFC, like the forward-swept wings, showed promise for the future of

aircraft design. The X-29 did not demonstrate the overall reduction in

aerodynamic drag that earlier studies had suggested, but this discovery should

not be interpreted to mean that a more optimized design with forward-swept wings

could not yield a reduction in drag. Overall, the X-29 program demonstrated

several new technologies as well as new uses of proven technologies. These

included: aero elastic tailoring to control structural divergence; use of a

relatively large, close-coupled canard for longitudinal control; control of an

aircraft with extreme instability while still providing good handling qualities;

use of three-surface longitudinal control; use of a double-hinged trailing-edge

flap at supersonic speeds; control effectiveness at high angle of attack; vortex

control; and military utility of the overall design. The book was overall very

informative in the sense that all terms and ideas were explained clearly and

simply in order to communicate to the general public better versus someone who

is educated in the aeronautics field. I highly recommend this book to someone

looking for a little overall knowledge of the X-29, but if you are looking for

in-depth report and analysis you should look elsewhere.

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/PAO/PAIS/HTML/FS-008-DFRC.html