Flying With Questions

Growing up as an expat kid I was always flying places. Not only did my parents, sisters and I move around all over Asia but our closest family lived in the United States. Therefore, holidays always consisted of 15+ hour flights where little Lara (me) would stick her forehead against the plane window and watch the clouds and night sky.

I always wondered how airplanes worked. Why is it a joke when people say “when pigs fly” and
yet a huge bus-like structure has no problem flying? Despite this curiosity, I never questioned this
out loud as when I looked around, everyone else on the plane seemed calm and unconcerned.
It was not until this fall break, when I was flying home, that I wondered how it really all work.
This is my first ever physics class and right away I was able to connect concepts we have learned
this semester to an aircraft. However, I wanted to look at this even further. How does the air affect
the plane? How does the plane even get off the ground? Therefore, I decided this would be a great
topic to look into for one of my “physics news” blogs.

The Wright brothers were the first to create a successful airplane in 1903. The two wings of their plane had a curved shape. This shape was able to push the air downwards resulting in a reaction force from air to push the wing upwards in an equal magnitude (we can attribute this to Newton’s 3rd Law). Eventually, this results in the lift force and the aircraft will be able to fly off the ground and into the air. Even today, a hundred years later, aircrafts still use the same airfoil technology (cross-sectional shape of a wing) to fly but with the highly aerodynamically optimized airfoil shape.

Simply put, there are four forces acting upon an aircraft. They are:

Weight --> which we know is the measurement of the pull of gravity on the plane and it acts towards the
center of the earth. 

Lift --> which acts perpendicular to the direction of relative motion.

Thrust --> which acts along the direction of motion, generated by engines to move the plane in the forward
direction.

Drag --> which acts opposite to the relative motion of the plane, generated by the air resistance.

These forces can account for the actions of a plane:

This course has given me answers to questions I thought of over two decades ago. Now, finally, after 21 years of flying, I have a better understanding of why planes are able to fly and why pigs are not.