Why is the tail group of virtually every airplane swept instead of straight?What is the reason for the poor low-speed characteristics of sweptback wings?What is the way to calculate the required twist of a flying wing?Is a swept wing the better option against the wingletWhy does the A340 have 4 engines instead of 2?Why is the coefficient of drag for straight wings at supersonic speeds lower than for swept wings?Why does the spanwise flow along a swept wing not accelerate?Why are airplanes described as the safest method of transportation?What are the disadvantages of using just rudder to roll an airplane?In the US, do ultralight aircraft have tail numbers?Why do some airplanes have simultaneously a straight wing and a swept horizontal stabilizer?How does an airplane move itself in the runway?Does the wing to fuselage fittings of an airplane ever experience shear load?

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Why is the tail group of virtually every airplane swept instead of straight?


What is the reason for the poor low-speed characteristics of sweptback wings?What is the way to calculate the required twist of a flying wing?Is a swept wing the better option against the wingletWhy does the A340 have 4 engines instead of 2?Why is the coefficient of drag for straight wings at supersonic speeds lower than for swept wings?Why does the spanwise flow along a swept wing not accelerate?Why are airplanes described as the safest method of transportation?What are the disadvantages of using just rudder to roll an airplane?In the US, do ultralight aircraft have tail numbers?Why do some airplanes have simultaneously a straight wing and a swept horizontal stabilizer?How does an airplane move itself in the runway?Does the wing to fuselage fittings of an airplane ever experience shear load?













4












$begingroup$


Even low performance airplanes like ultralights have their tail group (vertical and horizontal stabilizer+rudder and elevator) swept backwards knowing fully well that a straight tail group will produce more force than a swept tail group of thesame area.My question is,is the sweeping of an airplane's tail group simply aesthetics or is there some aerodynamic advantage involved?



The reason why I'm asking is because I'm tryna design and build an Ultralight and was wondering if I can just build a straight rectangular tail group as seen below(for the sake of simplicity).
enter image description here










share|improve this question









$endgroup$











  • $begingroup$
    Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
    $endgroup$
    – quiet flyer
    56 mins ago
















4












$begingroup$


Even low performance airplanes like ultralights have their tail group (vertical and horizontal stabilizer+rudder and elevator) swept backwards knowing fully well that a straight tail group will produce more force than a swept tail group of thesame area.My question is,is the sweeping of an airplane's tail group simply aesthetics or is there some aerodynamic advantage involved?



The reason why I'm asking is because I'm tryna design and build an Ultralight and was wondering if I can just build a straight rectangular tail group as seen below(for the sake of simplicity).
enter image description here










share|improve this question









$endgroup$











  • $begingroup$
    Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
    $endgroup$
    – quiet flyer
    56 mins ago














4












4








4





$begingroup$


Even low performance airplanes like ultralights have their tail group (vertical and horizontal stabilizer+rudder and elevator) swept backwards knowing fully well that a straight tail group will produce more force than a swept tail group of thesame area.My question is,is the sweeping of an airplane's tail group simply aesthetics or is there some aerodynamic advantage involved?



The reason why I'm asking is because I'm tryna design and build an Ultralight and was wondering if I can just build a straight rectangular tail group as seen below(for the sake of simplicity).
enter image description here










share|improve this question









$endgroup$




Even low performance airplanes like ultralights have their tail group (vertical and horizontal stabilizer+rudder and elevator) swept backwards knowing fully well that a straight tail group will produce more force than a swept tail group of thesame area.My question is,is the sweeping of an airplane's tail group simply aesthetics or is there some aerodynamic advantage involved?



The reason why I'm asking is because I'm tryna design and build an Ultralight and was wondering if I can just build a straight rectangular tail group as seen below(for the sake of simplicity).
enter image description here







aerodynamics airliner ultralight airplane






share|improve this question













share|improve this question











share|improve this question




share|improve this question










asked 8 hours ago









David TeahayDavid Teahay

1,2651028




1,2651028











  • $begingroup$
    Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
    $endgroup$
    – quiet flyer
    56 mins ago

















  • $begingroup$
    Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
    $endgroup$
    – quiet flyer
    56 mins ago
















$begingroup$
Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
$endgroup$
– quiet flyer
56 mins ago





$begingroup$
Get rid of "tryna". Also there are PLENTY of aircraft with non-swept tail groups. For example, most sailplanes.
$endgroup$
– quiet flyer
56 mins ago











3 Answers
3






active

oldest

votes


















1












$begingroup$

There is no doubt some aerodynamic benefit to sweeping tails on high speed airplanes, and there is some benefit, as Zeiss says, in that there is a modest increase in moment arm without lengthening the fuselage (on the other hand, the sweep imparts a small pitching moment when the rudder is displaced, but it's not enough to be a big deal).



At any rate, on just about all lower speed aircraft, especially GA ones, it's really just "styling"; one of the only places in aircraft design where form supersedes function.



In the early to mid 60s Cessna changed the vertical tails on their models from straight to swept. This had absolutely no effect on performance. It was pure styling because a swept tail looked more "modern" (It's also the time when they came out with silly marketing names like "Land-O-Matic gear".. you know, spring steel leaf or rod gear legs). Meanwhile pretty much all horizontal tails have remained straight. Why? Nobody cares how it looks from below. It's all about the profile.



So if there is a major technical benefit to sweeping a tail on a particular design, you can generally expect to see the horizontal tail also swept. Otherwise, styling.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
    $endgroup$
    – Peter Kämpf
    6 hours ago










  • $begingroup$
    Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    6 hours ago











  • $begingroup$
    Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
    $endgroup$
    – qq jkztd
    5 hours ago


















1












$begingroup$

There is more to it than just looks.



One immediate benefit is a more backward location of the center of pressure on the backwards swept surface. But that effect is small and has to be bought with a lower lift curve slope, i.e. lower effectivity at low angles of attack rsp. sideslip.



But once sweep is big enough, it will extend the useable range of sideslip angles at which the tail is effective. Sweep reduces the lift curve slope but extends its linear range to higher angles, so the maximum lift per area of a swept surface is about as high as that of an unswept surface. This is especially true for low aspect ratio wings where the outward movement of the boundary layer is not a big factor. Therefore, the aerodynamics of a vertical tail suffer much less from the usual sweep effects we know from swept wings.



Adding a fillet ahead of the root of the vertical tail increases this effect further and has been instrumental in making designs like the Boeing 307 spin proof. Before that change the Boeing 307 prototype suffered separated flow on the vertical in a spin and crashed when the aircraft oversped in an attempt by the pilot to end the spin by applying differential thrust.



While the wing operates in a narrow range of angle of attacks and straightens the airflow for the tail, so the horizontal tail is able to work within an even narrower range, the fuselage creates an unstable yawing moment over a much larger range of angles of sideslip. In order to have enough directional stability even at high angles of sideslip, a swept vertical tail is very helpful. Yes, this swept tail needs to be larger than an equivalent vertical tail which is designed for single-digit angles of sideslip, but this straight tail will render the aircraft unstable once it ventures into higher sideslip angles.



Reference: NLR Report A-1582. Sorry, I found no online source. It is discussed in Ed Obert's "Aerodynamic design of Transport Aircraft" on page 418.



Horizontal tails do not need the extended working range - here, it is enough to add stabilizer trim in order to adjust tail lift for different wing flap settings. Besides, building a horizontal tail with a swept hinge line is much more complicated than building a straight hinge line, so most horizontal surfaces have just a little sweep such that taper and sweep together result in a straight hinge line.



But there is one exception: In the early 70s many glider designs used a full-flying, swept horizontal tail, like this Standard Cirrus below (picture source):



Standard Cirrus in flight



This is obviously not for compressibility. By sweeping the tail its center of gravity can be moved close to its center of pressure, so this tail needs no mass balance and has low actuation forces. The downside is the rigid, symmetrical airfoil: At low speed and higher angle of attack it has very little effectivity because the flow stays separated while a conventional tail with a fixed stabilizer will already show attached flow. This led to a number of fatal crashes in winch launches when the aircraft would pitch up into a stall and could not be controlled.






share|improve this answer











$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    5 hours ago



















0












$begingroup$

One reason is to save weight.



It goes like this: the further to the rear the tail surfaces are, the smaller (and lighter) they can be, but fuselage structure is heavy. If you make the surfaces swept, the area is moved to the rear, but little if any weight is added compared to unswept surfaces.



Beyond the actual weight saved at the tail, we used to say in model building that "an ounce at the tail is worth a pound at the nose." That's because of moment arms; a tiny amount of weight in the tail may require a very large mass of structure (or even ballast) near the nose to keep the center of mass where you need it for stability.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
    $endgroup$
    – CrossRoads
    8 hours ago











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3 Answers
3






active

oldest

votes








3 Answers
3






active

oldest

votes









active

oldest

votes






active

oldest

votes









1












$begingroup$

There is no doubt some aerodynamic benefit to sweeping tails on high speed airplanes, and there is some benefit, as Zeiss says, in that there is a modest increase in moment arm without lengthening the fuselage (on the other hand, the sweep imparts a small pitching moment when the rudder is displaced, but it's not enough to be a big deal).



At any rate, on just about all lower speed aircraft, especially GA ones, it's really just "styling"; one of the only places in aircraft design where form supersedes function.



In the early to mid 60s Cessna changed the vertical tails on their models from straight to swept. This had absolutely no effect on performance. It was pure styling because a swept tail looked more "modern" (It's also the time when they came out with silly marketing names like "Land-O-Matic gear".. you know, spring steel leaf or rod gear legs). Meanwhile pretty much all horizontal tails have remained straight. Why? Nobody cares how it looks from below. It's all about the profile.



So if there is a major technical benefit to sweeping a tail on a particular design, you can generally expect to see the horizontal tail also swept. Otherwise, styling.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
    $endgroup$
    – Peter Kämpf
    6 hours ago










  • $begingroup$
    Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    6 hours ago











  • $begingroup$
    Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
    $endgroup$
    – qq jkztd
    5 hours ago















1












$begingroup$

There is no doubt some aerodynamic benefit to sweeping tails on high speed airplanes, and there is some benefit, as Zeiss says, in that there is a modest increase in moment arm without lengthening the fuselage (on the other hand, the sweep imparts a small pitching moment when the rudder is displaced, but it's not enough to be a big deal).



At any rate, on just about all lower speed aircraft, especially GA ones, it's really just "styling"; one of the only places in aircraft design where form supersedes function.



In the early to mid 60s Cessna changed the vertical tails on their models from straight to swept. This had absolutely no effect on performance. It was pure styling because a swept tail looked more "modern" (It's also the time when they came out with silly marketing names like "Land-O-Matic gear".. you know, spring steel leaf or rod gear legs). Meanwhile pretty much all horizontal tails have remained straight. Why? Nobody cares how it looks from below. It's all about the profile.



So if there is a major technical benefit to sweeping a tail on a particular design, you can generally expect to see the horizontal tail also swept. Otherwise, styling.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
    $endgroup$
    – Peter Kämpf
    6 hours ago










  • $begingroup$
    Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    6 hours ago











  • $begingroup$
    Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
    $endgroup$
    – qq jkztd
    5 hours ago













1












1








1





$begingroup$

There is no doubt some aerodynamic benefit to sweeping tails on high speed airplanes, and there is some benefit, as Zeiss says, in that there is a modest increase in moment arm without lengthening the fuselage (on the other hand, the sweep imparts a small pitching moment when the rudder is displaced, but it's not enough to be a big deal).



At any rate, on just about all lower speed aircraft, especially GA ones, it's really just "styling"; one of the only places in aircraft design where form supersedes function.



In the early to mid 60s Cessna changed the vertical tails on their models from straight to swept. This had absolutely no effect on performance. It was pure styling because a swept tail looked more "modern" (It's also the time when they came out with silly marketing names like "Land-O-Matic gear".. you know, spring steel leaf or rod gear legs). Meanwhile pretty much all horizontal tails have remained straight. Why? Nobody cares how it looks from below. It's all about the profile.



So if there is a major technical benefit to sweeping a tail on a particular design, you can generally expect to see the horizontal tail also swept. Otherwise, styling.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$



There is no doubt some aerodynamic benefit to sweeping tails on high speed airplanes, and there is some benefit, as Zeiss says, in that there is a modest increase in moment arm without lengthening the fuselage (on the other hand, the sweep imparts a small pitching moment when the rudder is displaced, but it's not enough to be a big deal).



At any rate, on just about all lower speed aircraft, especially GA ones, it's really just "styling"; one of the only places in aircraft design where form supersedes function.



In the early to mid 60s Cessna changed the vertical tails on their models from straight to swept. This had absolutely no effect on performance. It was pure styling because a swept tail looked more "modern" (It's also the time when they came out with silly marketing names like "Land-O-Matic gear".. you know, spring steel leaf or rod gear legs). Meanwhile pretty much all horizontal tails have remained straight. Why? Nobody cares how it looks from below. It's all about the profile.



So if there is a major technical benefit to sweeping a tail on a particular design, you can generally expect to see the horizontal tail also swept. Otherwise, styling.







share|improve this answer












share|improve this answer



share|improve this answer










answered 8 hours ago









John KJohn K

30.8k151101




30.8k151101











  • $begingroup$
    Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
    $endgroup$
    – Peter Kämpf
    6 hours ago










  • $begingroup$
    Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    6 hours ago











  • $begingroup$
    Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
    $endgroup$
    – qq jkztd
    5 hours ago
















  • $begingroup$
    Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
    $endgroup$
    – Peter Kämpf
    6 hours ago










  • $begingroup$
    Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    6 hours ago











  • $begingroup$
    Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
    $endgroup$
    – qq jkztd
    5 hours ago















$begingroup$
Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
$endgroup$
– Peter Kämpf
6 hours ago




$begingroup$
Horizontal tails stayed straight because a straight hinge line is much easier to build than a swept one. On a vertical which extends only to one side this makes no difference, but once there are two sides that need to meet in the middle it is better to keep them straight.
$endgroup$
– Peter Kämpf
6 hours ago












$begingroup$
Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
$endgroup$
– John K
6 hours ago





$begingroup$
Nonetheless, if there was significant benefit beyond looks they would have swept horizontal tails. The only low speed airplanes I can think with a swept horizontal tail is the Aerostar, and IIRC, the Swearingen homebuilt and in those cases I expect they were going after a little bit of extra arm.
$endgroup$
– John K
6 hours ago













$begingroup$
Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
$endgroup$
– qq jkztd
5 hours ago




$begingroup$
Other reason for straight horizontal tail is preventing elevator strike on runway when landing or taking off at minimal speed. Cessna 152 with swept horizontal tail should either place it higher, or further forward, or set some dihedral on it.
$endgroup$
– qq jkztd
5 hours ago











1












$begingroup$

There is more to it than just looks.



One immediate benefit is a more backward location of the center of pressure on the backwards swept surface. But that effect is small and has to be bought with a lower lift curve slope, i.e. lower effectivity at low angles of attack rsp. sideslip.



But once sweep is big enough, it will extend the useable range of sideslip angles at which the tail is effective. Sweep reduces the lift curve slope but extends its linear range to higher angles, so the maximum lift per area of a swept surface is about as high as that of an unswept surface. This is especially true for low aspect ratio wings where the outward movement of the boundary layer is not a big factor. Therefore, the aerodynamics of a vertical tail suffer much less from the usual sweep effects we know from swept wings.



Adding a fillet ahead of the root of the vertical tail increases this effect further and has been instrumental in making designs like the Boeing 307 spin proof. Before that change the Boeing 307 prototype suffered separated flow on the vertical in a spin and crashed when the aircraft oversped in an attempt by the pilot to end the spin by applying differential thrust.



While the wing operates in a narrow range of angle of attacks and straightens the airflow for the tail, so the horizontal tail is able to work within an even narrower range, the fuselage creates an unstable yawing moment over a much larger range of angles of sideslip. In order to have enough directional stability even at high angles of sideslip, a swept vertical tail is very helpful. Yes, this swept tail needs to be larger than an equivalent vertical tail which is designed for single-digit angles of sideslip, but this straight tail will render the aircraft unstable once it ventures into higher sideslip angles.



Reference: NLR Report A-1582. Sorry, I found no online source. It is discussed in Ed Obert's "Aerodynamic design of Transport Aircraft" on page 418.



Horizontal tails do not need the extended working range - here, it is enough to add stabilizer trim in order to adjust tail lift for different wing flap settings. Besides, building a horizontal tail with a swept hinge line is much more complicated than building a straight hinge line, so most horizontal surfaces have just a little sweep such that taper and sweep together result in a straight hinge line.



But there is one exception: In the early 70s many glider designs used a full-flying, swept horizontal tail, like this Standard Cirrus below (picture source):



Standard Cirrus in flight



This is obviously not for compressibility. By sweeping the tail its center of gravity can be moved close to its center of pressure, so this tail needs no mass balance and has low actuation forces. The downside is the rigid, symmetrical airfoil: At low speed and higher angle of attack it has very little effectivity because the flow stays separated while a conventional tail with a fixed stabilizer will already show attached flow. This led to a number of fatal crashes in winch launches when the aircraft would pitch up into a stall and could not be controlled.






share|improve this answer











$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    5 hours ago
















1












$begingroup$

There is more to it than just looks.



One immediate benefit is a more backward location of the center of pressure on the backwards swept surface. But that effect is small and has to be bought with a lower lift curve slope, i.e. lower effectivity at low angles of attack rsp. sideslip.



But once sweep is big enough, it will extend the useable range of sideslip angles at which the tail is effective. Sweep reduces the lift curve slope but extends its linear range to higher angles, so the maximum lift per area of a swept surface is about as high as that of an unswept surface. This is especially true for low aspect ratio wings where the outward movement of the boundary layer is not a big factor. Therefore, the aerodynamics of a vertical tail suffer much less from the usual sweep effects we know from swept wings.



Adding a fillet ahead of the root of the vertical tail increases this effect further and has been instrumental in making designs like the Boeing 307 spin proof. Before that change the Boeing 307 prototype suffered separated flow on the vertical in a spin and crashed when the aircraft oversped in an attempt by the pilot to end the spin by applying differential thrust.



While the wing operates in a narrow range of angle of attacks and straightens the airflow for the tail, so the horizontal tail is able to work within an even narrower range, the fuselage creates an unstable yawing moment over a much larger range of angles of sideslip. In order to have enough directional stability even at high angles of sideslip, a swept vertical tail is very helpful. Yes, this swept tail needs to be larger than an equivalent vertical tail which is designed for single-digit angles of sideslip, but this straight tail will render the aircraft unstable once it ventures into higher sideslip angles.



Reference: NLR Report A-1582. Sorry, I found no online source. It is discussed in Ed Obert's "Aerodynamic design of Transport Aircraft" on page 418.



Horizontal tails do not need the extended working range - here, it is enough to add stabilizer trim in order to adjust tail lift for different wing flap settings. Besides, building a horizontal tail with a swept hinge line is much more complicated than building a straight hinge line, so most horizontal surfaces have just a little sweep such that taper and sweep together result in a straight hinge line.



But there is one exception: In the early 70s many glider designs used a full-flying, swept horizontal tail, like this Standard Cirrus below (picture source):



Standard Cirrus in flight



This is obviously not for compressibility. By sweeping the tail its center of gravity can be moved close to its center of pressure, so this tail needs no mass balance and has low actuation forces. The downside is the rigid, symmetrical airfoil: At low speed and higher angle of attack it has very little effectivity because the flow stays separated while a conventional tail with a fixed stabilizer will already show attached flow. This led to a number of fatal crashes in winch launches when the aircraft would pitch up into a stall and could not be controlled.






share|improve this answer











$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    5 hours ago














1












1








1





$begingroup$

There is more to it than just looks.



One immediate benefit is a more backward location of the center of pressure on the backwards swept surface. But that effect is small and has to be bought with a lower lift curve slope, i.e. lower effectivity at low angles of attack rsp. sideslip.



But once sweep is big enough, it will extend the useable range of sideslip angles at which the tail is effective. Sweep reduces the lift curve slope but extends its linear range to higher angles, so the maximum lift per area of a swept surface is about as high as that of an unswept surface. This is especially true for low aspect ratio wings where the outward movement of the boundary layer is not a big factor. Therefore, the aerodynamics of a vertical tail suffer much less from the usual sweep effects we know from swept wings.



Adding a fillet ahead of the root of the vertical tail increases this effect further and has been instrumental in making designs like the Boeing 307 spin proof. Before that change the Boeing 307 prototype suffered separated flow on the vertical in a spin and crashed when the aircraft oversped in an attempt by the pilot to end the spin by applying differential thrust.



While the wing operates in a narrow range of angle of attacks and straightens the airflow for the tail, so the horizontal tail is able to work within an even narrower range, the fuselage creates an unstable yawing moment over a much larger range of angles of sideslip. In order to have enough directional stability even at high angles of sideslip, a swept vertical tail is very helpful. Yes, this swept tail needs to be larger than an equivalent vertical tail which is designed for single-digit angles of sideslip, but this straight tail will render the aircraft unstable once it ventures into higher sideslip angles.



Reference: NLR Report A-1582. Sorry, I found no online source. It is discussed in Ed Obert's "Aerodynamic design of Transport Aircraft" on page 418.



Horizontal tails do not need the extended working range - here, it is enough to add stabilizer trim in order to adjust tail lift for different wing flap settings. Besides, building a horizontal tail with a swept hinge line is much more complicated than building a straight hinge line, so most horizontal surfaces have just a little sweep such that taper and sweep together result in a straight hinge line.



But there is one exception: In the early 70s many glider designs used a full-flying, swept horizontal tail, like this Standard Cirrus below (picture source):



Standard Cirrus in flight



This is obviously not for compressibility. By sweeping the tail its center of gravity can be moved close to its center of pressure, so this tail needs no mass balance and has low actuation forces. The downside is the rigid, symmetrical airfoil: At low speed and higher angle of attack it has very little effectivity because the flow stays separated while a conventional tail with a fixed stabilizer will already show attached flow. This led to a number of fatal crashes in winch launches when the aircraft would pitch up into a stall and could not be controlled.






share|improve this answer











$endgroup$



There is more to it than just looks.



One immediate benefit is a more backward location of the center of pressure on the backwards swept surface. But that effect is small and has to be bought with a lower lift curve slope, i.e. lower effectivity at low angles of attack rsp. sideslip.



But once sweep is big enough, it will extend the useable range of sideslip angles at which the tail is effective. Sweep reduces the lift curve slope but extends its linear range to higher angles, so the maximum lift per area of a swept surface is about as high as that of an unswept surface. This is especially true for low aspect ratio wings where the outward movement of the boundary layer is not a big factor. Therefore, the aerodynamics of a vertical tail suffer much less from the usual sweep effects we know from swept wings.



Adding a fillet ahead of the root of the vertical tail increases this effect further and has been instrumental in making designs like the Boeing 307 spin proof. Before that change the Boeing 307 prototype suffered separated flow on the vertical in a spin and crashed when the aircraft oversped in an attempt by the pilot to end the spin by applying differential thrust.



While the wing operates in a narrow range of angle of attacks and straightens the airflow for the tail, so the horizontal tail is able to work within an even narrower range, the fuselage creates an unstable yawing moment over a much larger range of angles of sideslip. In order to have enough directional stability even at high angles of sideslip, a swept vertical tail is very helpful. Yes, this swept tail needs to be larger than an equivalent vertical tail which is designed for single-digit angles of sideslip, but this straight tail will render the aircraft unstable once it ventures into higher sideslip angles.



Reference: NLR Report A-1582. Sorry, I found no online source. It is discussed in Ed Obert's "Aerodynamic design of Transport Aircraft" on page 418.



Horizontal tails do not need the extended working range - here, it is enough to add stabilizer trim in order to adjust tail lift for different wing flap settings. Besides, building a horizontal tail with a swept hinge line is much more complicated than building a straight hinge line, so most horizontal surfaces have just a little sweep such that taper and sweep together result in a straight hinge line.



But there is one exception: In the early 70s many glider designs used a full-flying, swept horizontal tail, like this Standard Cirrus below (picture source):



Standard Cirrus in flight



This is obviously not for compressibility. By sweeping the tail its center of gravity can be moved close to its center of pressure, so this tail needs no mass balance and has low actuation forces. The downside is the rigid, symmetrical airfoil: At low speed and higher angle of attack it has very little effectivity because the flow stays separated while a conventional tail with a fixed stabilizer will already show attached flow. This led to a number of fatal crashes in winch launches when the aircraft would pitch up into a stall and could not be controlled.







share|improve this answer














share|improve this answer



share|improve this answer








edited 5 hours ago

























answered 5 hours ago









Peter KämpfPeter Kämpf

164k13418674




164k13418674











  • $begingroup$
    I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    5 hours ago

















  • $begingroup$
    I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
    $endgroup$
    – John K
    5 hours ago
















$begingroup$
I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
$endgroup$
– John K
5 hours ago





$begingroup$
I've flown an LS-1 which has the same tail and which flew great stick fixed, but stick free, having no anti-servo tab, it seemed to get pretty much all of its static stability from the trim bungee. Stick free it was slowly divergent, and I felt that without the bungee providing some centering force it would have been all over the place stick free. I let it go while eating a sandwich once, and eventually it was diving to Vne and pulling up to near stall even though it was trimmed to about 60kt.Perhaps the bungee was weak. Since you don't actually fly them that way, it wasn't really a problem.
$endgroup$
– John K
5 hours ago












0












$begingroup$

One reason is to save weight.



It goes like this: the further to the rear the tail surfaces are, the smaller (and lighter) they can be, but fuselage structure is heavy. If you make the surfaces swept, the area is moved to the rear, but little if any weight is added compared to unswept surfaces.



Beyond the actual weight saved at the tail, we used to say in model building that "an ounce at the tail is worth a pound at the nose." That's because of moment arms; a tiny amount of weight in the tail may require a very large mass of structure (or even ballast) near the nose to keep the center of mass where you need it for stability.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
    $endgroup$
    – CrossRoads
    8 hours ago















0












$begingroup$

One reason is to save weight.



It goes like this: the further to the rear the tail surfaces are, the smaller (and lighter) they can be, but fuselage structure is heavy. If you make the surfaces swept, the area is moved to the rear, but little if any weight is added compared to unswept surfaces.



Beyond the actual weight saved at the tail, we used to say in model building that "an ounce at the tail is worth a pound at the nose." That's because of moment arms; a tiny amount of weight in the tail may require a very large mass of structure (or even ballast) near the nose to keep the center of mass where you need it for stability.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$












  • $begingroup$
    Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
    $endgroup$
    – CrossRoads
    8 hours ago













0












0








0





$begingroup$

One reason is to save weight.



It goes like this: the further to the rear the tail surfaces are, the smaller (and lighter) they can be, but fuselage structure is heavy. If you make the surfaces swept, the area is moved to the rear, but little if any weight is added compared to unswept surfaces.



Beyond the actual weight saved at the tail, we used to say in model building that "an ounce at the tail is worth a pound at the nose." That's because of moment arms; a tiny amount of weight in the tail may require a very large mass of structure (or even ballast) near the nose to keep the center of mass where you need it for stability.






share|improve this answer









$endgroup$



One reason is to save weight.



It goes like this: the further to the rear the tail surfaces are, the smaller (and lighter) they can be, but fuselage structure is heavy. If you make the surfaces swept, the area is moved to the rear, but little if any weight is added compared to unswept surfaces.



Beyond the actual weight saved at the tail, we used to say in model building that "an ounce at the tail is worth a pound at the nose." That's because of moment arms; a tiny amount of weight in the tail may require a very large mass of structure (or even ballast) near the nose to keep the center of mass where you need it for stability.







share|improve this answer












share|improve this answer



share|improve this answer










answered 8 hours ago









Zeiss IkonZeiss Ikon

4,137621




4,137621











  • $begingroup$
    Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
    $endgroup$
    – CrossRoads
    8 hours ago
















  • $begingroup$
    Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
    $endgroup$
    – CrossRoads
    8 hours ago















$begingroup$
Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
$endgroup$
– CrossRoads
8 hours ago




$begingroup$
Smaller planes: Marketing. Look at Mooney, straight tail, vs Cessna/Piper/Bonanza. All went to swept tails because it looked faster.
$endgroup$
– CrossRoads
8 hours ago

















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