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Asked by anon-267545 on 10 Nov 2020.
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Liza Sazonova answered on 10 Nov 2020: last edited 10 Nov 2020 2:49 pm
Planes are actually very good at flying. Some people are scared of them because they’re big metal cans in the sky, but they’re especially designed to be extremely good at staying in the air. Even if the engine shuts off for a little bit, the plane will just glide through air for a while. It’s a pretty cool engineering invention!
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Of course, they have an engine that makes the plane go really fast, which really helps. If a car goes really fast it can also take off the ground for a bit (racing cars are weighed down for this purpose), but they won’t stay afloat.
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The real magic is in the plane /wing/. It is especially designed to create /lift/, a force that drives the plane upward. The shape of the wing is designed to sort of capture the wind around the plane and direct it underneath the airplane. Because there is more air underneath, the pressure is high there. The pressure on top of the wing is low. Then all the extra air underneath tries to escape, and pushes the plane upwards.
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A cool consequence of this happens at the very tip of the wing: the low and high pressure areas meet and collide to make a vortex! It’s made of air so you can’t see it, but some scientists put some paint at the tip of a plane wing and made this amazing image of a wingtip vortex as a plane takes off:
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Bradley Young answered on 11 Nov 2020:
An aeroplane can take off if there is more force upwards on it than downwards (gravity). The upwards force is called lift and is cause by the wings creating a higher air pressure underneath the plane like Liza says.
For the aeroplane to stay in the air, the upwards (lift) and downwards (gravity) forces need to be balanced. You can make the lift force equal the gravity force by changing things like the speed of the plane or the angle of the wings.
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