Aspect ratio on a wing without taper IS wingspan divided
by the chord. But few wings are strictly a rectangle. Many
have wingtips instead of being squared off. Many have
some taper, and the area covered by the fuselage is not
an extension of the taper, but figured
by straight lines connecting the left and right leading edge
points at the root and left and right trailing edge points at
the root. Not to mention airplanes with taper breaks and/or
other non-straight leading or trailing edges.

So, the easier way is to use the area and the square of the span.

Aspect Ratio (AR) is the square of the wingspan divided by
the area of the wing.

Now - to clarify the misreading of the note:

basic middle school math:
the upward arrow means to raise to the power

aero = a kindergarten form of area
also called fumble fingered the keys


Aspect Ratio is very much a part of the discussion. The biplane
has lots of area and not much span. Low aspect ratio. Inefficient.

Make the wing chord real skinny and Reynold's number comes
into play. But that's another story.





In article ,
(Jay) wrote:
Thanks Alexy,

I wasn't sure what the convention was in aero work for defining
"aspect", it doesn't really matter as long as everybody agrees on the
same definition! So I just took David's definition and went from
there.

Then in his next expresion said "span^2/aero", so I figured "AERO"
meant something that he hadn't defined, but I should have implicitly
known, and figured at this point it wasn't crucial to the discussion.

But this is the reason why I was trying to discuss relationships
before we got into botched algebra. I'm seem to be continually making
those kinds of errors so I end up doing everything 2 ways just to make
sure.


alexy wrote in message
. ..
Dave Hyde wrote:

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics here.
An infinte (span) wing has an aspect ratio of INFINITY, not zero.
LARGER aspect ratio is less drag.
Dave, to be fair to Jay, you did type

:The _definition_ of aspect ratio is chord/span

Of course, you immediately contradicted that by typing

r span^2/aero (they're equivalent)

which should have clued anyone in that you had inverted the first
expression.