{"id":562,"date":"2008-08-19T16:00:33","date_gmt":"2008-08-19T23:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/?p=562"},"modified":"2008-06-26T08:53:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T15:53:49","slug":"square-aeroplanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/square-aeroplanes\/","title":{"rendered":"Square aeroplanes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Almost all aeroplanes have round cross-sections. This doesn&#8217;t seem to be the best shape for optimal use of the interior space. In particular, it means that there isn&#8217;t much headroom above the window seats. On my most recent flights I found that could not even stretch my arms above my head.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think the reason for these round cross-sections is an aerodynamic one &#8211; if I recall my fluid dynamics correctly, drag is a function of turbulence, which is caused by chaotic vortices being shed from the trailing edge. I don&#8217;t think that would be affected by a square cross section.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that the real reason is that with our current materials, it&#8217;s easier to make planes strong enough if they&#8217;re round &#8211; a square cross section would have weak points at the corner edges and might lead to parallelogramming. I wonder if future advances in materials science might be able to counteract this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost all aeroplanes have round cross-sections. This doesn&#8217;t seem to be the best shape for optimal use of the interior space. In particular, it means that there isn&#8217;t much headroom above the window seats. On my most recent flights I found that could not even stretch my arms above my head. I don&#8217;t think the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}