how do aeroplanes fly

introduction 

 We take for it granted that we can fly from one side of the world to the other in a matter of hours, but a century ago this amazing ability to race through the air had only just been discovered. What would the Wright brothers—the pioneers of powered flight—make of an age in which something like 100,000 planes take to the sky each day in the United States alone? They'd be amazed, of course, and delighted too. Thanks to their successful experiments with powered flight, the airplane is rightfully recognized as one of the greatest inventions of all time. Let's take a closer look at how it works!

How do planes fly?

If you've ever watched a jet plane taking off or coming in to land, the first thing you'll have noticed is the noise of the engines. Jet engines, which are long metal tubes burning a continuous rush of fuel and air, are far noisier (and far more powerful) than traditional propeller engines. You might think engines are the key to making a plane fly, but you'd be wrong. Things can fly quite happily without engines, as gliders (planes with no engines), paper planes, and indeed gliding birds readily show us.

If you're trying to understand how planes fly, you need to be clear about the difference between the engines and the wings and the different jobs they do. A plane's engines are designed to move it forward at high speed. That makes air flow rapidly over the wings, which throw the air down toward the ground, generating an upward force called lift that overcomes the plane's weight and holds it in the sky. So it's the engines that move a plane forward, while the wings move it upward.

How do wings make lift?

In one sentence, wings make lift by changing the direction and pressure of the air that crashes into them as the engines shoot them through the sky.

Pressure differences

Okay, so the wings are the key to making something fly—but how do they work? Most airplane wings have a curved upper surface and a flatter lower surface, making a cross-sectional shape called an airfoil .

In a lot of science books and web pages, you'll read an incorrect explanation of how an airfoil like this generates lift. It goes like this: When air rushes over the curved upper wing surface, it has to travel further than the air that passes underneath, so it has to go faster (to cover more distance in the same time). According to a principle of aerodynamics called Bernoulli's law, fast-moving air is at lower pressure than slow-moving air, so the pressure above the wing is lower than the pressure below, and this creates the lift that powers the plane upward.

Although this explanation of how wings work is widely repeated, it's wrong: it gives the right answer, but for completely the wrong reasons! Think about it for a moment and you'll see that if it were true, acrobatic planes couldn't fly upside down. Flipping a plane over would produce "downlift" and send it crashing to the ground. Not only that, but it's perfectly possible to design planes with airfoils that are symmetrical (looking straight down the wing) and they still produce lift. For example, paper airplanes (and ones made from thin balsa wood) generate lift even though they have flat wings.

But the standard explanation of lift is problematic for another important reason as well: the air shooting over the wing doesn't have to stay in step with the air going underneath it, and nothing says it has to travel a bigger distance in the same time. Imagine two air molecules arriving at the front of the wing and separating, so one shoots up over the top and the other whistles straight under the bottom. There's no reason why those two molecules have to arrive at exactly the same time at the back end of the wing: they could meet up with other air molecules instead. This flaw in the standard explanation of an airfoil goes by the technical name of the "equal transit theory." That's just a fancy name for the (incorrect) idea that the air stream splits apart at the front of the airfoil and meets up neatly again at the back.

So what's the real explanation? As a curved airfoil wing flies through the sky, it deflects air and alters the air pressure above and below it. That's intuitively obvious. Think how it feels when you slowly walk through a swimming pool and feel the force of the water pushing against your body: your body is diverting the flow of water as it pushes through it, and an airfoil wing does the same thing (much more dramatically—because that's what it's designed to do). As a plane flies forward, the curved upper part of the wing lowers the air pressure directly above it, so it moves upward.

Why does this happen? As air flows over the curved upper surface, its natural inclination is to move in a straight line, but the curve of the wing pulls it around and back down. For this reason, the air is effectively stretched out into a bigger volume—the same number of air molecules forced to occupy more space—and this is what lowers its pressure. For exactly the opposite reason, the pressure of the air under the wing increases: the advancing wing squashes the air molecules in front of it into a smaller space. The difference in air pressure between the upper and lower surfaces causes a big difference in air speed (not the other way around, as in the traditional theory of a wing). The difference in speed (observed in actual wind tunnel experiments) is much bigger than you'd predict from the simple (equal transit) theory. So if our two air molecules separate at the front, the one going over the top arrives at the tail end of the wing much faster than the one going under the bottom. No matter when they arrive, both of those molecules will be speeding downward—and this helps to produce lift in a second important way.

Downwash

If you've ever stood near a helicopter, you'll know exactly how it stays in the sky: it creates a huge "downwash" (downward moving draft) of air that balances its weight. Helicopter rotors are very similar to airplane airfoils, but spin around in a circle instead of moving forward in a straight line, like the ones on a plane. Even so, airplanes create downwash in exactly the same way as helicopters—it's just that we don't notice. The downwash isn't so obvious, but it's just as important as it is with a chopper.

This second aspect of making lift is a lot easier to understand than pressure differences, at least for a physicist: according to Isaac Newton's third law of motion, if air gives an upward force to a plane, the plane must give an (equal and opposite) downward force to the air. So a plane also generates lift by using its wings to push air downward behind it. That happens because the wings aren't perfectly horizontal, as you might suppose, but tilted back very slightly so they hit the air at an angle of attack. The angled wings push down both the accelerated airflow (from up above them) and the slower moving airflow (from beneath them), and this produces lift. Since the curved top of the airfoil deflects (pushes down) more air than the straighter bottom (in other words, alters the path of the incoming air much more dramatically), it produces significantly more lift.