For lifting re-entry there may be advantages in using wings which give as high a lift coefficient as possible at the design value of the lift/drag ratio. This paper presents the results of an experimental and theoretical study of wings with recessed lower surfaces designed to give high values of CL. The calculations show that a wide range of wing shapes can be found that give values of CL which are much larger than those on a flat wing with the same lift/drag ratio.

The problem of the supersonic flow with attached shock wave past a circular cone at zero angles of attack is treated, using the thin-shock-layer expansion. The solution is calculated to the fourth approximation. A simple formula is then derived for the surface pressure coefficient by the application of the parameter-straining technique and it is shown to be very accurate for the whole Mach number range for which the shock remains attached to the cone vertex.

A unified treatment is given of the orbital and attitude stability of space shuttles in parking orbits (in vacuo) in the earth’s gravitational field. A shuttle in a circular orbit with a principal axis aligned with the horizontal in the orbital plane is found to be in stationary geostatic equilibrium. The demand for stability leads to a condition which must be satisfied by the principal moments of inertia. The stability which is achieved is not asymptotic without control. The stationary state is a stable centre about which a bounded perturbation oscillation without damping may exist.

The present experiment describes the behaviour of a turbulent boundary layer on a concave wall. At the onset of curvature there appears a fairly coherent wavelike transverse profile of mean velocity. This disturbance might be interpreted as a kind of large scale Taylor-Görtler type instability superimposed on a conventional turbulent boundary layer; further downstream the coherence degenerates as the turbulence level increases. Boundary-layer profile measurements were made at positions of maxima and minima of transverse profiles of (U-component) mean velocity. The boundary layer at the minima positions is found to be twice as thick as that at the maxima positions. Also, turbulent intensities inside the boundary layer are substantially increased as a result of the concave curvature of the surface.

A subsonic, lifting-surface method is extended to apply to low-frequency oscillations of wind-tunnel models, taking into account both longitudinal and lateral variations of tunnel lift interference. Rectangular sectioned tunnels with closed, slotted or open roof and floor and closed sidewalls are considered. A comparison is made between the aerodynamic derivatives obtained by this method and those calculated with the assumption that the model span is small compared to the tunnel width. Three models of aspect ratio 2.67 and different sweepback are considered in rigid pitching oscillations in tunnels of width/height ratio 2.5. The greatest differences between the results from the two methods occur for the tunnel with closed roof and floor and for the unswept planform. The least differences occur for the slotted tunnel and for the planform of greatest sweepback. The results indicate that, for models of conventional size [up to span/(tunnel width) ratio of 0.4], the “small-span” assumption is satisfactory in tunnels with slotted roof and floor and closed side walls, but not in fully closed tunnels.

A comparison is made of two recently published integral equation methods for calculating the high subsonic flow around lifting and non-lifting aerofoils. It is shown that one method leads to a non-unique solution.

The numerical aspects of the integral equation method developed by Nixon and Hancock for two-dimensional steady shock-free flow have been rationalised; this numerically refined method is evaluated by calculating the pressure distribution around a wide range of aerofoils. These test cases include aerofoils in supercritical shock-free flow as well as subcritical flow and exact solutions are available for comparison. The computational time in the present method is significantly less than that required by the exact methods. The present results compare satisfactorily with the exact results.