ADVANCED LIGHTPLANE WING
 
     The Lancair, a recently-introduced two-place airplane,
and the Prescott Pusher, a four-place craft, are both
"homebuilt" private airplanes; they are assembled by the
owner from a parts/components kit supplied by a
manufacturer. In addition to the fact that both are kit
planes, they share another common feature: each has a
NASA-developed high efficiency natural laminar flow (NFL)
wing.
 
     The Lancair, Neico Aviation, Santa Paula, California,
is built of premolded parts made of advanced composite
materials.  The airplane has a gross weight of only 1,400
pounds.
 
     The tubular fuselage frame of the Prescott Pusher is
heliarc welded at the factory and wings, tail and control
surfaces are of traditional aluminum.  The company, Prescott
Aeronautical Corporation, Wichita, Kansas, employed
Computer-aided Design (CAD) techniques to assure extreme
accuracy in shaping the configuration.  Prescott also used
Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM) techniques to build the
hard tooling that produces the kit parts to extremely
precise tolerances.
 
     Both airplanes were in conceptual stage in the early
l980's when NASA's Langley Research Center was developing
the NFL airfoil. Langley has long been active in developing
technology for general aviation, meaning all planes other
than commercial airliners and military aircraft. Langley's
work focuses on improved safety and greater airplane
efficiency through development of new wings, auxiliary
airfoils and other components. In the l970s, Langley
developed a GAW series of general aviation airfoils with
high lift characteristics and better safety through benign
stalling qualities.  At about the same time, Langley was
also working on natural laminar flow airfoils, principally
for military aircraft.  As a follow-on to the GAW series,
Langley began work in the latter l970s on an advanced
technology NFL airfoil for general aviation aircraft.
 
     Laminar means "smooth."  The intent of the NFL design
is to overcome the tendency of the air flowing over the wing
to become turbulent as airplane speed increases.  Maintain-
ing smooth airflow in cruise flight reduces air drag and
that translates into reduced fuel consumption or greater
speed, possibly both. The Langley-designed NFL airfoil can
reduce induced drag by as much as 30 percent while also
providing improved lift. In addition, it is more tolerant of
airflow disturbances than earlier laminar flow airfoils.