GA Airfoils

Excellent book! A "must have" for anyone contemplating building or designing an airplane. Mr. Riblett puts things in an easy to understand perspective - i.e. "layman terms" - and debunks many myths and fallacies of airfoil design while exposing the short-comings of various "traditional" airfoils. (This, of course, doesn't necessarily sit well with the inside-the-box crowd.) Mr. Riblett's airfoils are right up there with on a par with John Roncz designs. Highly recommended!

I oversee the spirited Yahoo Group called "airfoil" on Yahoo Groups and Riblett's airfoils and philosophies are often discussed. His book has concise, direct explanations of classic airfoils, their purposes and functions, and improvements he has made to them. This book contains the ordinates he has derived from the classic laminar flow airfoils, only his have modifications allowing for softer stalls. He makes a good case throughout for using airfoils of lower pitching moments and explains the advantages and disadvantages of each. Riblett's book shows how to change the poor stalling characteristics of the BD-5 airplane into much softer-stalling and lower stalling speeds. He describes the disadvantages of the NACA 23000 series airfoil as they form a close-to-leading edge laminar bubble prior to stall. He describes the poor camber profile of the leading edge of the NACA 2312 airfoils. He makes a good case for all these. He emphasizes safety above all in his oratory. He has pages and pages of tables of his airfoils' ordinates so that the reader can create his or her own airfoils from these ordinates. He has many performance charts and graphs which allow the reader to understand which airfoil is most well-suited for their self-designed aircraft. Riblett discusses spins and the necessity for specific airfoils and planforms which resist spins. Though technical at times, it is all eventually understandable to the reader. It's a great book for helping the homebuilder/designer design and use the airfoil most appropriate for his mission requirements, and yet have it also be an airfoil with safety as being part of its mission. I bought an early edition of this book and Mr. Riblett autographed it for me. I've read it so many times, I wore it out! But it has been replaced with the current book which is much sturdier and made for lasting throughout much study and page-turning. This is the book which spurred my interest in airfoils and I'm forever grateful to him for writing it!