There has been a "lively" discussion about landing the "Deuce" and it has brought many good points about a wing, flaps, slants and their effect on flight performance.
With the advantage of "hindsight", lets talk a little about the "shape" of the wing, different styles and shapes of wings and what the designers had in mind when they designed the wing for a particular aircraft.
The B-17! Everybody knows, or at least, most people know about the history of this aircraft and its roll in WW2!
The wing shape is known as a "Hersey" bar shaped wing because it is flat on the bottom and curved on the top!
The designers knew that the aircraft was going to be flown with very in-experienced pilots, some just out of flight school, so they had to design a wing which was very forgiving and docile in a stalled condition. They used a "split" flap design because that is the simplest flap design and is designed to do nothing except produce drag for landing!
The exact opposite of that was the wing on the B-26 "Martin", which was designed for speed, which the pilots, when introduced to this aircraft, soon named it, a "prostitute" because like them, had no visible means of support! It was also know as, "one a day in Tampa Bay" because it was a "bear" to land, because of the high speed necessary to land safely.
Getting back to the 17! The wing on it was designed to fly very slow, which produced easy landing handling and was very forgiving in all realms of flight, again, the designers kept in mind it was to be flown by in-experienced pilots under all kinds of conditions. This design produced flight conditions, even with two engines out on one side, to be acceptable and proved later to be correct in what the designers had in mind, something that would carry a acceptable load of ords, crew and fuel, yet be able to be handled by in-experienced pilots!
I won't go into technical aspects of the wing, other than to say that it had very little "wash" out, no "slants" or other devices in which to slow it down for landing! All the Army ask the designers to do was produce something that would cruise about 220MPH and land at 80MPH, carry 6,000 pounds of ord and be able to carry enough fuel to stay airborne about 6 hours. Tall order back in the day, but Boeing did it!
The primary concern was a wing that would stall evenly from tip to wing root, hence they decided the "Hersey" bar shape would be the best for that.
Now compare the B-24 wing with the 17! It, the 24 wing, was a "Laminar" flow type of design, which was designed primarily for speed and was trickily in slow fight conditions, when compared to the 17 wing! Condsidated tried to overcome the slow speed handling problems by installing a nose wheel, which helped in landings for sure. But that brought on more problems because with a single tail design of one vertical stabilizers, they found it wouldn't go into the hangars of the day with a nose wheel, so they decided to use a "split" vertical stabilizer and rudder combination which lowered the tail assembly enough to be able to pass into the hangars of the day back then. The 24 also had a "fowler" flap, which was designed to introduce lift at slow speeds and lower the stalling speed of the aircraft.
Sorry, didn't mean to write a "book" but this is an interesting way of introducing non-pilots in the game about why different wings on different aircraft in this game!
