A) what DENNY said, the first time you bend a one off wing on some remote Alaskan island you're going to really appreciate this... Heck, bend a Husky or EXCC wing in the boondocks and you'll either really appreciate this or your the kind of guy tha hands the keys to the insurance man and moves on... not that there's anything wrong with that.
B) because so many people have used them and varied them that it has become very easy for the average builder to extrapolate what kind of performance to expect out of them...
Battson wrote:Are Cub wings really still revolutionary these days?
I'm not entirely convinced they were revolutionary when they were adapted to a J3
Would you want to bolt them onto a modern-day aircraft?
Absolutely, see reasons above
Sure they are good, but so are a lot of other wing designs...
Agreed, IMHO the BH uses a better wing
Looking at a Cub, it seems to me the Cub has enormously long wings for its size, and it pays an unduly heavy airspeed penalty for it.
Cub:
This is fundamentally incorrect, increasing the length of my wings didn't negatively effect the speed what so ever, increasing the aspect ratio (all else equal) doesn't
By comparison, look at a couple of modern alternatives. The wings the SuperSTOL for instance - they are midget wings side by side with a Cub. It still performs like a Cub at similar weights in terms of STOL.
(put a moose, 3 caribou, or roughly the weight of another cub again in it and get back to me...) Legal or not this can and has been done in a cub forever... ag, Alaska, you name it.... I don't advocate overloading your airplane, but history clearly tells what has been hauled in a cub.
For a fairer comparison comparison to a longer winged Cub variation, with a modern aerofoil:
Patrol:
I like this wing
The Patrol wing area is larger than the Cub, except the Patrol will fly about 30% faster than a Cub at equal power settings - which is a LOT given drag increases with the square of velocity. And that for only a knot or two difference in stall speed (demonstrated with a stock wing).
Unfortunately the problem with the Patrol comparison is that it is a Patrol wing on a Patrol not a cub, and a cub wing on a cub not a Patrol.
It has been proven that a cub with an AOI out of whack by as little as 1 degree will not perform as well as one that measures dead nuts. Consequently, IMHO taking an entirely different airship with differing AOI, differing fuselage differing drag situations, ad naseum is an exercise in futility... we may as well be comparing granny smiths to vidalias
I am not trying to start a contest here, just to demonstrate my point - there are clear competitors - what is it about the Cub's wings which makes them special in the eyes of many?
What say you?
My opinion ? My opinion is that you can buy every part related to a cub wing, and assemble any Lego land form of cubausaurus wing you can dream of. You can then look at history and without even going through the aeronautical engineering calculations , get a pretty good idea of what it's going to do, and then when you tweak it in the sticks somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you can still go to DENNYS neighbor, grab a wing (or maybe both if yours differed immensely) bolt them on and fly it home... What's not to like about that
