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Boeing 757 Airfoil

- question from Augustine Santiago

Unlike most other manufacturers, Boeing tends to be quite cryptic about the airfoils used on its aircraft. The company has been designing its own airfoils under the BAC (Boeing Aircraft Company) and TR series for several decades, and it is not easy to obtain their coordinates. In this case, we have been unable to determine the name of the root airfoil section on the 757, but the wingtip airfoil is the Boeing TR-51 mod. Finding an illustration of this shape has been even more challenging and I'm afraid the best we've come up with is this grid visualization developed for a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the 757 wing.

Boeing 757 wing airfoil section

As we might expect, this shape appears to be a supercritical airfoil, the advantages of which were discussed previously. This type of airfoil is commonly used on aircraft that cruise at transonic speeds, approximately Mach 0.7 to Mach 1.2. Since the 757 typically cruises between Mach 0.8 and Mach 0.85, it makes sense that a supercritical airfoil would be used for its wing.

Boeing 757 wing airfoil section lift coefficient

A computational prediction of the lift coefficient vs. angle of attack for the 757 airfoil is provided in the picture above.
- answer by Jeff Scott, 14 April 2002

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