Flight

3 Pages 833 Words

Research: Airplanes are an efficient way of traveling to far places. Airplanes are

amazing if you know what and how the air keeps the plane airborne. There are three components of

flight: aerodynamics, the Bernoulli principal and supersonic flight. Some other things about flight are

the four forces, lift, drag, weight, and thrust. One of the basic things you need to know about

airplanes is that the places where the plane can balance on one point called the center of gravity.

The tail on the plane is needed to balance the pitching movement. First of all, aerodynamics plays a

major role on many things, especially in airplanes. Aerodynamics is the reaction of the air on the

specially shaped wing that lifts an airplane off the ground. Also, aerodynamics is the study of gases

in motion. The term aerodynamics comes from the Greeks meaning air power. Isaac Newton bases

aerodynamics on the physics theorem. People who experiment with aerodynamics are called

aerodynamicist. Their basic tool is the wind tunnel. A professor of engineering, Osborne Reynolds,

conducted many experiments with paper airplanes and regular airplanes and found out Viscosity

(thickness) affects the way fluids behave. All fluids have some viscosity. As a fluid flows over a

surface, the fluid molecules closest to the surface cling microscopic roughness of the surface. As you

move away from the surface, there is a small transition distance where the fluid’s viscosity limits the

change in speed of the adjacent molecules, until at a certain distances the fluid is at full speed.

(Paper airplane aerodynamics www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1817/paene/html) Osborne

invented a number that was devised which gives the importance of viscosity in fluid flow. It’s called

the Reynold’s number. Reynold’s number =9340 for air so you’d take 9340x velocity relative to

surface (mph) x length over surface flui...