Until I read the book, I did not know that laminar airfoils were engineered in the 1930s. That convinced me that I could build a laminar wing. So now I need to plan what I want to build. Thank you.

James I Verified Purchase

GA Airfoil By Harry Riblett

Amazing insight from an accomplished engineer, including fully qualified exposure of NACA/ NASA bureaucratic wastefulness.

Peter G Verified Purchase

GA Airfoil By Harry Riblett

Trying to find a safer airfoil for the BD-5 was challenging. Glad to have this book.

A wealth of information on airfoils that apply to GA aircraft. For the homebuilder / aviation enthusiast that wants to understand and use the optimal airfoil on their project, or optimize characteristics for a purpose, this book helps get you where you need to be. With the help of this book, I optimized the airfoil for my project in under a week. Now... off to flight test.

This book has a lot of good information, however, the quality of the print and images could be better. It would not take much to do this for a newer release of this book. (Not sure How that works with copyright law and deceased authors though...) Aircraft Spruce and Specialty shipped it the same day though, which was awesome!

This is a very interesting book. There are 16 pages of 8-1/2 x 11 single spaced text followed by about a hundred pages of airfoils and articles. Harry points out that the NACA airfoils were test subjects for the wind tunnel but not the intended for aircraft. The 5-digit airfoils (e.g. 23012) are particularly scorned. I took me a few times through the text to figure out his method. An important book. I am glad I have it.

The late Harry Riblett wrote this book for general aviation after finding NASA disinterested in airfoil development for GA in 1986. He bought a computer and developed GA airfoils for our typical airspeeds, and this book is the result. The discussion is good, but the illustrations are sometimes hard to read being mainly hand drawn. Also, the organization is haphazard, and in my copy I wrote the page number to the referenced figures for easier rereading. The table of contents does give page numbers for the figures-use it. This is the first GA airfoil book to use a computer analysis, and later computer programs are better but this may be all the book that you need for this subject.