Customer Reviews

Airplane Design: A Series of Articles Printed First in Kitplanes Magazine

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This book is a reprint of an excellent series of articles by Don Crawford that were first published in Kitplanes magazine. These articles focus on "bite-sized" pieces of the overall design problem. Many articles are accompanied by computer program code listings. An excellent resource for anyone that would like to design their own aircraft, or modify their homebuilt.

Dont be fooled by its low price - This is an excellent collection of extremely useful articles which allows anybody with a sound understanding of engineering and mathematics to analyze and synthesize all of the major aspects of light aircraft design and performance.
The associated subprograms are written in the BASIC language which is now somewhat dated and not necessarily native on recent operating systems, however the papers include full equations with explanations and derivations of the transforms and methods used along with ample references to learned texts, allowing one to transfer the algorithms to another language or mathematical spread sheet such as Mathcad, Open-Office Calc etc if so desired.
If the reader is not mathematically inclined, then they might be best to avail themselves of the Book "A Practical Guide to Airplane Performance and Design" also by the same writer, which makes use of graphical solutions to the same equations.

I highly recommend both of these references to anybody interested in light aircraft design or analysis.

Grahamm Comber

FliteWorx Pty Ltd Australia