NACA 4-Digit Airfoil Series Page 1 of 2

The NACA 4-Digit Airfoil

| Definition | Uses | References |

Definition:

Example: NACA 2415

NACA 2415
The first digit designates the Maximum Camberline Height is as a percentage of the chordlength. In this example,
the 2 implies that the camberline will reach a maximum height equal to 2% of the overall chordlength. A value of
zero means that the airfoil is symmetrical.

NACA 2415
The second digit designates WHERE the Maximum Camberline Height will occur chordwise as a percentage of
chordlength in tenths. In this example, the number 4 implies that the camberline will reach its maximum height at a
distance of 40% of the way back from the leading edge.

NACA 2415
As with all of the NACA airfoils, the last two digits combine together to designate how thick the airfoil is as a
percentage of chordlength. In this example, our airfoil will be 15% of the chordlength thick. With this class of
airfoils, the maximum thickness occurs at a distance of 30% from the leading edge.

Airfoil Uses:

Considered the workhorse of the general aviation industry, the NACA 4-Digit airfoils have been very popular since their
inception in the 1930's. Both the cambered and symmetrical version of these airfoils have found their way onto a large
number of aircraft. Most of the Cessna-type aircraft have wings built around either a single instance or combination of
NACA 4-Digit airfoils. Symmetric versions of these airfoils (0012 for example) are extremely popular for horizontal
stabilizer sections, helicopter rotor sections as well as Fairing & Shroud sections around landing gear.

These airfoils are relatively tame and don't usually produce unexpected surprises (sudden stalls, etc...). One of the
reasons for their benign characteristics is the relatively non-laminar boundary layer. Because of its mostly turbulent

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NACA 4-Digit Airfoil Series Page 2 of 2

nature, degraded surface quality doesn't usually have a noticable impact (as compared with the NACA 6-Series). The
trade-off of for this benign behavior is the noticably higher drag than that of the later laminar flow series known as the
NACA 6-Series.

When cambered, these airfoils produce a moderate to high pitching moment. It was this undesirable tendency that
caused the NACA to do further research into airfoils with identical thickness distributions that would exhibit lower pitching
moments. The result of their work was the NACA 5-Digit airfoils.

Factoid: The basic NACA 4-Digit thickness distribution did not appear out of thin air. In the 1930's, two of the most
successful airfoils were the Clark-Y (named after its inventor Virginius Clark) and the German-developed Gottingen-398
airfoils. Each of these was scaled up to 20% thickness and "amalgamated" to produce the basic NACA 4-Digit thickness
distribution.

References:

"The Characteristics of 78 Related Airfoil Sections From Tests In The Variable-Density Wind Tunnel", Jacobs, Ward
& Pinkerton, NACA Technical Report No. 460, 1935.
"Theory Of Wing Sections", Abbott & Von Doenhoff, Dover Publications, New York, 1959.

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