Me 163 profiles

It is usually reported that the root section of the Me 163B wing uses a Göttingen 765 profile. But no contour data of this particular profile has surfaced so far. This page shows several attempts at deriving the contour data of the Komet's root section. It could be that the actual root section is not Göttingen 765. One possibility is that the camber line of Göttingen 765 was combined with a different thickness distribution. So far, the puzzle hasn't been cracked 100%, but Keith Pickering has come very close with his excellent analysis of the data presented down this page.

There is a significant problem with doing measurements on the real aircraft. The wing's trailing edge is straight, except for a small inboard part, where the wing root fairing starts, and the trailing edge has a small curvature. It can be assumed that the root section is based on chord length without the small extension due to the wing root fairing curvature. This figure is 2360 millimeters according to Messerschmitt drawings. The root fillet adds some 130 millimeters to the root chord (the exact figure is yet to be measured!), which translates into a 5.5% chord extension. This will reduce the relative thickness of the section, and thus mess up the measurements. Also, the trailing edge contour is no longer reliable.



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