About
About this site
How Spain made the rotor fly — the hinge, the workshops and the aerodromes it grew on.
Geometry firstRotor design was argued on paper before it was flown; the drawing carries the dimensions that mattered.
RFAE is an editorial site about rotorcraft engineering as it was worked out in Spain, and about the aerodromes and workshops that made the work possible. The subject has a clear centre: a rotor in forward flight is asymmetric, that asymmetry produces a rolling moment, and a freely hinged blade absorbs it. Every entry here is one problem in the airflow and the answer somebody found for it.
The site is organised in five sections. Rotorcraft takes the mechanisms one at a time. Engineers covers the people who drew, machined and flew them, Juan de la Cierva foremost among them. Manufacture is about how an industry was built — CASA at Getafe, engine work in Barcelona, airframes in Seville. Aerodromes covers the fields themselves: Cuatro Vientos, Getafe, Tablada, Sabadell. The Collection is what survives, chiefly at the Museo del Aire.
Sectioned to be understoodA cut-away assembly explains in one look what a page of description struggles with.
Where a mechanism is easier to see than to read about, the entries use the photographs and the drawings rather than more prose. The engineering is described as engineering: what the part does, what load it carries, and what changed when it was fitted.
Every section can be reached from the index at the top of any page, and the whole roster sits in one place on the register.