Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

A Mathematical Analysis Of The Wind Triangle Problem And An Inquiry Of True Airspeed Calculations In Supersonic Flight, Leonard T. Huang, Lisa I. Cummings

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

In the first half of this paper, we present a fresh perspective toward the Wind Triangle Problem in aerial navigation by deriving necessary and sufficient conditions, which we call "go/no-go conditions", for the existence/non-existence of a solution of the problem. Although our derivation is based on simple trigonometry and basic properties of quadratic functions, it is mathematically rigorous. We also offer examples to demonstrate how easy it is to check these conditions graphically. In the second half of this paper, we use function theory to re-examine another problem in aerial navigation, namely, that of computing true airspeed — even in …