How airplanes fly

Basic principles of flight

The basic principles of why and how airplanes fly
apply to all airplanes, from the Wright Brothers' first
machine to a modern Stealth Bomber, and it's actually
not difficult to understand how airplanes get, and stay,
airborne.

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Aerodynamic forces
Essentially there are four aerodynamic forces that act
on an airplane in flight; these are lift, drag, thrust and
gravity (or weight).

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Thrust

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Thrust
Forward force during the flight.
Several ways to produce this force-jets, propellers or
rockets (pushing the air backward).
The same effect for a propeller moving a large mass of
air backward at a relatively slow speed, or by a jet
moving a small mass of air backward at a relatively
high speed.
For jet aircraft, the means of thrust is the gas turbine
engine.

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DRAG

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DRAG
Resistance force due to the motion of the aircraft
through the air.
For an airplane to maintain steady flight, there must be
sufficient lift to balance the weight of the airplane, and
there must be sufficient thrust to overcome drag.

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WEIGHT

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Weight
The weight of an airplane is the force, which acts
vertically downward toward the center of the earth and
is the result of gravity on the airplane.
The weight of an airplane acts through the center of
gravity (C.G.).
This is the point through which the resultant of the
weights of all the various parts of the airplane passes,
in every attitude that the airplane can assume.

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LIFT

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Lift
The wings of an airplane are designed so that
when moved through the air horizontally, the
force exerted on them produce a reaction, it
is this reaction that lifts the weight of the
airplane.
Lift on an aircraft acts through the center of
pressure (C.P).

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How wings generate lift

A cross section of a typical airplane wing will show the top
surface to be more curved than the bottom surface. This
shaped profile is called an 'airfoil' (or 'aerofoil').
During flight air naturally flows over and beneath the wing.

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How wings generate lift

Any given 'parcel' of air gets split in two as it hits the leading edge of the wing, and both halves of that
parcel actually meet up again at the same moment as they come off the trailing edge of the wing.
So because the air moving over the top of the wing has more distance to cover (because of the
curvature it is forced to follow) in the same amount of time as the air passing below the wing, it has to
move faster.
Faster moving air is less dense than slower moving air, so this speed difference results in a lower air
pressure on top of the wing, and a higher air pressure below the wing. The result of this pressure
gradient is that the wing, and hence the plane, is pushed upwards by the higher pressure.

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How wings generate lift

One of the argued theories of lift generation is that some of the air that passes
beneath the wing is deflected downwards.
This causes an opposite upward force in accordance with Newton's 3rd Law of
Action & Reaction that acts upon the underside of the wing, effectively pushing it
upwards.
It's widely agreed that this upward force also occurs because the air that comes
over the top surface of the wing moves downwards as it flows off the trailing edge,
hence forcing the upwards reaction.

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How wings generate lift

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Exercise

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Questions???

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