Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Richard Whitcomb is an aeronautical engineer. In the 1950s, Whitcomb proposed the 'Area Rule', which used the total profile of the airplane's wing to calculate drag and stated that the cross section of the aircraft should vary smoothly from nose to tail. In the area rule, the cross sectional area of the body should have a smooth variation with longitudinal distance along the body. There should be no rapid or discontinuous changes in the distribution of cross sectional areas. On the other hand, the supercritical airfoil behaves in a different way. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.