A Modern Representation of the Historical Body of Work on Airfoils: NACA Report 824 and Hoerner’s Fluid-Dynamic Lift Revisited with XFOIL, MSES and AVL Through OCR and AI-Agent Automation

Systematic comparisons of the classic airfoil literature with modern codes have been limited less by physics than by the labour of extracting data from scanned charts. This study shows that optical character recognition and an AI agent, working under the author’s direction, can automate this chain: source retrieval, chart calibration, visual data reading, simulation campaigns, quality control and documentation. With this workflow, all 112 section charts of NACA Report 824 and three planform figures of Hoerner’s Fluid-Dynamic Lift were recomputed with XFOIL, MSES and AVL in about 7.5 hours of elapsed time. Lift-curve slopes agree to a median +2.2 % (XFOIL), and the overprediction grows with thickness. Zero-lift angles are too negative in proportion to camber in both codes; transition modelling and tunnel-wall corrections were ruled out as causes. Drag is underpredicted by about 15 % at all Reynolds numbers. The offset vanishes for Ncrit ≈ 5, an effective parameter for surface imperfections or the shared boundary-layer model. Maximum lift is overpredicted, most for thin sections. AVL reproduces Hoerner’s planform data within a few per cent where the flow is attached and the edges are sharp. Automated checks found errors in the source, the codes and the agent’s own work; human verification remains essential.