How Do Planes Fly: Thrust and Drag Airplanes take advantage of four forces. Lee Dempsey/HowStuffWorks.com Drop a stone into the ocean and it will sink into the deep. Chuck a stone off the side of a mountain and it will plummet as well. Sure, steel ships can float and even very ...
How Do Planes Fly: Thrust and Drag Airplanes take advantage of four forces. Lee Dempsey/HowStuffWorks.com Drop a stone into the ocean and it will sink into the deep. Chuck a stone off the side of a mountain and it will plummet as well. Sure, steel ships can float and even very ...
Many people are scared of flying because they are frightened that the airplane they are in will crash. And yet, while airplanes do crash, it is safer to fly in an airplane than to travel on the road in a car. A survey done in the United States in 2001 found that 20% of Americans ...
But how exactly do airplanes fly? Flight requires two things: thrust and lift. Thrust is the forward motion provided by a propeller or jet engine. (A propeller, by the way, uses the same principles discussed below to create lift, but it uses that lift to move the plane forward instead ...
“You’d be amazed—even on short flights, the most [fuel] efficient way to do it is climb the airplanes up to high altitude, pull the power back, and then start back down,” he says. “I may run up to 31,000 feet and I won’t be there five minutes.” [Related: Let’s ...
turbulence is responsible for 75 percent of all weather-related aircraft crashes. Severe turbulence can structurally damage the airplane and cause the pilot to lose control, which may in turn lead to a crash. Even in airplanes that do not crash, turbulence can still cause accidents. Indeed, it...
Doesn’t the orientation of the wings with respect to the airplane body get messed up when airplanes fly upside down? In other words, when the plane’s wings face the opposite direction of their aerodynamic design, why don’t they crash?
During peak air travel times in the United States, there are about 5,000 airplanes in the sky every hour. This translates to approximately 50,000 aircraft operating in our skies each day. How do these aircraft keep from colliding with each other? How does air traffic move into and out...
Airplanes are also sometimes fitted with stick pushers. The pusher system physically pushes the controls if the aircraft comes close to a stall. How airplanes are designed to delay the stall The delaying of a stall is important as it allows the manufacturers to build an aircraft that has better...
The typical flight school these days operates very slow airplanes at airports with very long runways. In the owner's manual, the manufacturer will report that a test pilot was able to land the plane in 500' of runway. You have 5000' or 7000'. You do not need precise technique to make...