How does an airplane fly?
How does an airplane fly?
Most of us have
probably seen or felt wind blowing things like flags or kites around. But how
is it possible that heavy airplanes (some weighing almost half a million
pounds, or more than 200,000 kilograms) are able to be supported by air high
above the ground?
The answer may
sound strange at first, but it's actually the air that is
pushing the airplane's wings and the rest of it up. The air under the
wings pushes up more than the air on top of
the wings pushes down. This "pushing" by the air is
called air pressure. We can think of air pressure as air
"press"-ing down or up against something else. On a windy day, you
can actually feel the air pressure push against your body. The wings of an
airplane "feel" a similar pushing, but there happens to be a bigger
pressure under the wings and a smaller pressure on the top.
What's really
amazing is why this happens. The special shape of an
airplane's wing makes the air moving around it behave in a certain way. If we
look at an airplane's wing from the side, we can see that the wing is a special
shape called an airfoil.
An airfoil is curved on the top and flat on the
bottom, causing some of the air to go over the top and the rest of the air to
go along the bottom. This shape looks simple, but it is the main reason airplanes
can fly at all. Because of the airfoil's curved shape, the air moving under the
airfoil moves at a slower speed
than the air going over the top.
A
scientist named Daniel Bernoulli (Ber-NEW-lee), who lived more than 200 years
ago, did work that proves slow-moving air causes a high pressure and fast-moving
air causes a low pressure.
Because there is a higher pressure "pushing" on the underside of the
wing than on the top, the bottom pressure wins out overall and the wings (and
the airplane attached to it) are pushed up, making the entire thing fly!
You can actually see
this for yourself. If you take a strip of paper and blow over the top of it as
shown in the picture below, the paper will rise.
What
happened? You lowered the pressure that was pushing down on the top of the
paper, causing the pressure on the bottom side of the paper to push the paper
strip up. The same thing happens when air pushes on the bottom side of an
airplane's wing. The pressure that is pushing the airplane up creates a force
called lift in the upwards direction.
For any query comment your question here and for contect me mail me at faiyazpatel555@gmail.com.
My other blogs Or read more at:
Comments
Post a Comment