Planes
Entry posted by ncharles
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A common way to spark ideas for this blog is to do cool stuff and have amazing experiences. And although flying in a plane is not such an “amazing” experience, it has sparked a couple ideas that I would like to share. As I was flying, I began to think “How exactly does a plane fly?”. Newton’s Second Law popped in my mind thinking that we are obviously not accelerating in the y-plane so the force of the plane up must be equal to the weight of the plane (mass times the force of gravity) Although the weight of the plane would vary with our altitude, the change is rather negligible to the scale of forces we are talking about. And since we are in-fact moving in the x-plane the must be a force directed in the -x-plane to cause moving in the +x-plane. So I came to the conclusion that the engines in the plane must produce two forces, one up to counteract gravity and one back to actually cause the plane to move. I know this is a rather simple observation but it was something I had never thought of until now!
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