From Lanchester to the A380; from the era of the great pioneers to the integrated engineering teams and sophisticated analyses required to develop todays airliner. The ‘art’ of Aerodynamics has progressed a long, long way in the intervening century, but even with todays computational power it is still relevant to understand the basics and the early theories as developed by Lanchester and his contemporaries. In this lecture, the relevance of some of that early work and the compromises that must be made in optimising a modern wing design will be presented. These will include optimisation of spanwise loading, including trimming effects and winglets, and high and low speed aerodynamic and structural interactions, with examples drawn from the author's career in helping to develop the wings for the HS146 (now the RJX) and the Airbus family.

With the exponentially increasing computer power available over the last 30 years, the ‘art of compromise’ has progressively become the ‘science of optimisation’ and the lecture closes with a brief reference to techniques used to optimise current wing designs for the Airbus family.