Airplanes
| Home Page |
| Airplane Safety |
| Airplane Crashes |
| Bibliography |
An airplane is a heavier-than-air aircraft kept aloft by the upward thrust exerted by the passing air on its fixed wings and driven by propellers, jet propulsion, etc.
Airplanes fly in the air. They transport people and cargo around the world, making life a whole lot easier. People can travel around the world for vacation more quickly. Airplanes follow a specific formula that allows them to lift off. The formula, created by Orville and Wilbur Wright, is right below:
As the airplane prepares to take off, it burns fuel to move forward. The wings of the aircraft are specifically designed to flow the air down, causing lift. So as the plane pulls up its nose, the air flowing as the plane is moving rushes on top of the wing, and back down, forcing the air to resurface. This makes the airplane lift off.
In order for control in the air, the planes have special mechanisms that allow them to turn left and turn right, go up and go down, go forward and slow down. These forces are called, lift, gravity, thrust and drag. The airplane fuel in the engines are combined with the flowing air going through the engine. They then go deeper into the engine, where there is a combustion chamber and as the fuel and air get burned, it creates thrust. This makes the airplane move in the atmosphere. The pilots in the cockpit control the flight with the rudder, flaps ,elavators and ailerons. The rudder which is at the fin of the plane, makes the plane move left or right. The flaps generate lift and drag. When the flaps are lifted, it sticks up on the wing, causing the air not to flow down. It produces drag, which means slowing down the aircraft. The elavators make the plane go up and go down. As the elavators go down, the plane goes up. As the elavators go up, the plane goes down. The ailerons make the plane either roll left, or roll right. When the aileron on the left wing goes down, and the aileron on the right wing goes up, the plane rolls right and vice versa.
Timeline
1901 |
First successful flying model propelled by an internal
combustion engine by Samuel Pierpont Langley. |
1903 |
First sustained flight with a powered, controlled
airplane |
| 1914 |
Automatic gyrostabilizer leads to first automatic pilot |
1914-1918 |
Dramatic improvements in structures and control
and propulsion systems |
|
1917 |
Junkers J4, an all metal airplane, is introduced |
1925-1926 |
Introduction of lightweight, air-cooled
radial engines |
1927 |
First non-stop flight across the Atlantic |
1933 |
Douglas introduces the 12-passenger twinengine DC-1. First modern commercial airliner |
1935 |
First practical radar |
1937 |
Jet engines designed |
1949 |
First jet-powered commercial aircraft |
1952 |
Discovery of the area rule of aircraft design |
1963 |
First small jet aircraft enters mass production |
1969 |
Boeing 747 |
1986 |
Voyager circumnavigates the globe (26,000 miles)
nonstop in 9 days |
1995 |
First aircraft produced through computer-aided design
and engineering |
1998 |
Joint research program to develop second-generation
supersonic airliner |
As you can see, airplanes have been around for a century now. They have improved drastically, from gliders to propeller planes, to jet airplanes.