Acknowledgements

First and foremost I am grateful to my family and friends for the their unending support during this unexpected journey. You never gave up, and held your tongue when the best laid plans went awry.

To Bridget: my friend and advisor, I couldn’t have done it without your encouragement. It’s been quite the experience.

Also, as computer engineering student with no background in aerodynamics, it was a long road of self-study to reach even my humble level of understanding of this topic. I would like to extend a warm “Thank you!” to Hervé Belloc for his generosity to share the wind tunnel data, and to Robert Kulhánek for taking the time to explain some subtleties of aerodynamics.

And my enduring respect and gratitude to all the software developers that contributed to the free software ecosystem used to produce this project; this project would be impossible without their work. In particular, I am ever grateful for the scientific computing stack (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib) and the open source aerodynamics models (XFOIL, AVL, and XFLR5).