RRG Fafnir 2
| Fafnir 2 | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Role | High performance glider |
| National origin | Germany |
| Manufacturer | Rhön-Rossitten Gesellschaft (RRG) |
| Designer | Alexander Lippisch |
| First flight | c. July 1934 |
| Number built | 1 |
The RRG Fafnir 2 São Paulo, named after the legendary dragon and the Brazilian city which partially financed it, was a single seat German high performance glider designed by Alexander Lippisch. It set a new world distance record in 1934 and won the 1937 International Gliding Championships.
Lippisch began the design of the Fafnir 2 in 1934. Apart from being a wood and fabric aircraft with a strongly tapered cantilever gull wing, it had little in common with the Fafnir of 1930, though lessons had been learned from that design. During 1934 the RRG was disbanded and its technical section, led by Lippisch, moved from the Wasserkuppe to Darmstadt to become the DFS, so the new glider was sometimes known as the DFS Fafnir 2. It was Lippisch's last conventional glider design.
The most immediately obvious difference between the two designs was that the Fafnir 2 was a mid-wing aircraft. The original Fafnir had a high wing and initially suffered serious aerodynamic drag losses at the wing-fuselage junctions. Wind tunnel studies at the University of Göttingen showed that these losses were lower with mid-wing designs. They also suggested that the wing and fuselage be integrated and the latter be cambered to provide some lift. The strongly tapered wing was ply covered ahead of the single spar, forming a torsion resisting D-box, and fabric covered aft over most of the span, though the surface near the fuselage was wholly ply covered. The wing section, designed by Lippisch himself, was much thinner and less cambered than on the Fafnir, with less low speed lift but also less high speed drag, reflecting the increasing understanding that cross country gliding required speed between thermals as well as the ability to climb within them. As on the original Fafnir, only the inner 40% of the span had dihedral. Tapered ailerons, their chord increasing outwards, occupied all the trailing edge of the outer panels.
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