Aero‐Elastic Problems

THE subject of aero‐elasticity, and in particular flutter, which is its largest and most complex branch, is one which the non‐specialist approaches with trepidation. Today, however, a large proportion of the design and development effort on any aircraft, and to a particularly high degree on high‐performance aircraft, has to be devoted to the solutions of flutter problems, which can so easily be the source of sudden and catastrophic failure in the air. It is therefore desirable that the understanding of the fundamentals of the subject should not be confined to the specialists in the field, and with this in mind we have in the past few months devoted a considerable amount of space to expositions of the theory and practice of the work of flutter and vibration departments, intended to provide the reader with general engineering knowledge with some understanding of the subject, and to give students who may later specialize in it an introduction to the principles.