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Trouble with Chris Heintz design book

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WurlyBird

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 31, 2008
Messages
192
Location
North Pole, Alaska
I have started reading Chris Heintz' book Flying on Your own Wings which I hoped would help me start getting a better understanding of design principles and get me back into math and science a bit since I dropped out of UCF's engineering program a few years back to join the Army. I have read Simplified Aircraft Design for Homebuilders by Raymer and Light Airplane Design by Pazmany and both of these are rather general in a lot of aspects and I wanted something with a little more meat. Here is my problem, and I want to make sure I am not crazy, I am only just into chapter 3 and Heintz has made few statements that I believe to be false. Very false. He is much more educated then me and has forgotten more about engineering then I ever learned but if I am correct about these statements it makes all the stuff I don't understand and am trying to learn questionable. Here is the real doosie that has be completely confused (if I am wrong someone please correct me)

He defines;
The unit of Force as grams and goes on to say that weight is grams, Kilograms, etc.
Mass=weight/earth's acceleration (this sounds good but then he goes backwards) so;
Mass= W/g = (kg.sec^2)/m

I learned that Mass is gram, kg, etc. and "weight" or the force we can measure due to gravity is measured in N, Newtons, and the correct unit for this is kg.m/sec^2.

This definition of Mass is used in all his following equations for inertia, kinetic energy, etc. which all look odd because of this. Am I crazy?
 
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