You would be perfectly within your rights as an aviation enthusiast to think most people have a pretty good understanding of how an airplane flies. After all, it’s been 121 years since the boys from Ohio flew their Flyer over the sands of Kitty Hawk. The airlines of the world carried something on the order of 4.5 billion passengers last year. That’s half the human population on the planet.
So it’s reasonable to assume that most folks know how an airplane works. Except they don’t.
Consider this: Students in the United States score second from last in geographic knowledge when compared to students from other nations. Our kids can’t find entire continents on a map. And those continents are glued down pretty solid. They don’t move so much they’d be hard to find without a Bluetooth tracker tag attached.
Airplanes, on the other hand, operate on a combination of three things: Large piles of money, invisible forces, and government oversight. That’s pretty much true. Aircraft owners can verify the claim, I assure you.
Money we understand. None of us has as much as we want, but all of us have enough to pay tax.
Fortunately, a small collection of hard-core enthusiasts have made it a point to squirrel away a sufficient supply of dollars to own and operate aircraft. These folks are so community minded that many of them put their aircraft up for rent so the rest of us can enjoy the gift of flight, too.
Thank you, aircraft owners. The bulk of us appreciate you.
The invisible force part of the equation is a bit more mysterious. It’s real. We can feel it. We can demonstrate it. We can even scare the beejeezus out of unsuspecting passengers with it. But being invisible is a little weird.
Want proof? No problem.
Lift is created by the wing. We all know that. And the word “airfoil” is a synonym for “wing.” We all know that, too. Yet, ask the average airport bum how many wings there are on an airplane and they’ll likely answer “two.” In many cases that’s true — Stearman, Waco, Travel Airs, and Jennys notwithstanding.
Ask that same individual how many airfoils that airplane possesses, and they’ll start counting on their fingers as they struggle to tally up the various parts of the machine.
Some claim lift is exclusively a vertical force that allows the airplane to rise into the air. That’s almost true. There’s nothing exclusive about the direction of lift.
They ignore the big spinning disk of airfoils mounted to the nose of the craft. The blast of wind coming off the propeller may blow their hat off and pitch sand in their face, but they call that thrust, not lift.
Make no mistake, thrust derived from a spinning propeller is just lift shifted over to the horizontal. The airfoil’s speed through the air and angle-of-attack are bound by the same laws of physics as the big stationary wings sticking out from either side of the fuselage.
That’s to say nothing of the weirdness of the vertical stabilizer and rudder, which are airfoils too. Turn them on their side and they become wings with full span ailerons. Really big ones. And they operate on the same principle. Deflecting the rudder one way or the other increases lift in the opposite direction.
Lift — it’s everywhere.
Now, I don’t want to freak out any new pilots, but the real puzzler is found at the tail of the airplane. The horizontal stabilizer and elevator or stabilator if you’re into the PA28 realm.
The horizontal stabilizer is an airfoil, just like the wing, and the propeller, and the vertical stabilizer. But while the propeller produces lift horizontally in a forward direction, and the vertical stabilizer produces lift in the horizontal laterally, and the wing produces lift in an upward direction, is it really such a surprise to learn the horizontal stabilizer and elevator create lift in a downward direction?
Yep, lift is pulling us up, and down, and left, and right, as we need it. It’s not an exclusively vertical force at all. It’s everywhere, doing everything we need it to do all the time.
In simple terms, the airplane is basically a high-tech seesaw. The Center of Gravity is forward pushing the nose downward. The Center of Lift is located slightly aft of the CG, pulling the airplane upward. Without a force at the tail end of the airplane to balance out those forces, all flights would terminate at the end of the runway. There would be no way to lift the nose, to increase the angle of attack on the wing, to establish an increase in lift.
It’s magic. It’s science. It’s amazing. And even if we don’t understand exactly how it works, we can still take the controls and successfully guide an airplane into the sky to experience the wonder of flight for ourselves.
Of course, being ignorant of how the machine works is not something to be proud of or to settle for.
Truthfully, it’s best if we do understand it. Many of us have been seeking a better understanding of how these machines work since Orville and Wilbur got the ball rolling. Glenn Curtiss did his part. Bob Hoover did his. If there’s any justice in this world, you’ll do your best, too.
The learning never stops. The attempt to make that next flight better, that next landing a real greaser, is still strong. A good pilot never throws up his or her hands and announces, “I know it all now. There’s nothing left to learn.”
So with that in mind, we’ve covered the money part and the lift issue. That only leaves us with government oversight to explore. Frankly, I think we’ve got enough rules for the moment. Maybe a few too many. Perhaps we can agree to leave that tang of the aeronautical trident alone for the time being.
Me, I’m happy just trying to explain to my grandkids how a machine this big, and this heavy, can rise up into the air whenever I want it to. Weather permitting, of course.
