I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I’ve seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just… Soars… Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf… It’s crazy. With how much these things weigh, it’s insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we’re flying now. Like wow… Dude crazy.
it works because we believe in it. if everyone would lose faith in airplanes, they’d drop out of the sky.
Can I just lose faith in the private jets?
And will it fly higher if we have the Faith of the Heart?
WhhaaahhhHH!!!
easier yet, if everyone crams to the tail, it will likely crash
Is this true? Sounds true but I feel like this should also be a test they do to ensure it doesn’t fail.
You think that’s crazy? The ship that blocked the Suez Canal, the Ever Given, has a ship displacement (how much water is displaced when it sits in the ocean) of 265,000 Tons.
That’s 240 million kilograms.
And that shit just floats on fucking water maaaaan…
Since when 1000kg is not equal to one tonne?
Ton (imperial) is 2000lb vs tonne (metric)
There are tons of tons, believe it or not.
There’s the short ton (2000lbs), long ton (2240 lbs), and tonne (1000kgs) which are all measure weight. However there’s also the shipping/freight/ocean ton which is a measure of volume (which is also different in the US and UK), and the register ton.
However I did make a mistake. The wikipedia page I was reading said the weight in t and long tons. I made the mistake of assuming they meant short tons - in reality when measuring displacement for a ship, tonnes are used (which is pretty sensible, considering you’re displacing water and a liter of water to a kilogram of water have a pretty easy conversion formula formula…)
I see, the common “Americans will use anything but SI”, but in this case it’s also the Brits lol
Thanks for explanation
This guy tons.
Don’t get them going about their crazy units!
Dafuq is this!? Stress testing?
No, every once in a while the planes need to stretch out. They get tired from being so stiff. This helps their joints later in their life span.
Basically. The wings have to be able to bend that much so they don’t break off in strong winds or hard maneuvers.
Airplane engines have deceptively high thrust, imagine each one as a rocket and it’ll start to make sense. The a380 (the big double decker) each engine produces around 350KN. When that thrust is applied to an 80kg human they’ll experience almost 450Gs of force
In an extreme sense, imagine putting a little rocket engine on a paper airplane which will represent a high thrust to weight ratio
Your last description is essentially the idea behind the F-117a. That thing
isn’twasn’t flying,it’sit was achieving escape velocity.
The 777 is 375-ish tons, and the A380 is 630-ish tons.
I’m a mechanical engineer and have a general understanding of how wings work. I’ve flown many times. That shit still feels like magic to me.
I was most impressed by the sheer amount of power those engines put out when you finally take off. The acceleration gave me a boost of adrenaline when I flew for the first time (it was a Southwest Boeing 737)
And I can only imagine how they feel when empty.
Consider the amount of air its wings must displace in order to stay aloft. An equal quantity of mass at least. It’s passing through that air and, partly pushing it down, but also partially scraping it thin over the bowed top surface of the wing (the Bernoulli principle) which creates a pressure differential that lifts the wing, pulling it upward through suction, and thus the plane. That’s why the plane must go fast to fly, and why it “stalls” and falls if it isn’t moving through enough air. It’s also how turbulence affects a plane. Differences in air pressure mean that in pockets of low pressure there isn’t as much mass being displaced by the wings, not enough lift so it falls.
Now, it’s quite likely that my layman’s comprehension of this is flawed. But I’m sure it’s entirely possible that someone will correct me soon :3
To be pedantic: It’s not necessarily an equal amount of mass, it just has to accelerate (this includes deceleration which is acceleration opposing a component of a vector of travel) any amount of mass along and opposite to the vector of the plane’s acceleration due to gravity so long as the amount of mass (and the averaged amount of that mass’ acceleration in the aforementioned direction i.e. force) is in ratio with the planes mass and it’s acceleration due to gravity.
There’s a lot of other pedantic caveats but they’d make this comment far too long. The main thing I want to convey is that mass doesn’t necessarily matter but rather force (m*v) and also that the “suction” and thereby acceleration that a plane’s airfoil experiences is also it causing an acceleration on the air around it by decelerating it along the path that it wants to flow. It all depends on frame of reference.
I suck at explaining things, this video might do a better job at getting the idea across.
Thank you kindly! :D
Damn no one has corrected you in 10 minutes. That’s pretty good!
I fully expect to come back to lemmy in 48 hours to find a fascinatingly detailed and viciously incisive rebuttal that calls me at least three slurs in the first paragraph, sprinkles additional passive aggressive repudiations of my character throughout, and finishes with a tactical f-bomb too :D
I’ve got 7 hours left at work I’ll drum something up for you…
How else are we supposed to learn things?!
I still look up whenever u hear a plane fly over. Heavier than air travel is treated way to casually
I think whoever doesn’t look up as they hear a plane or helicopter flying is insane. Ever since as a child I have looked up.
It’s magical, right? It’s what got me interested in aviation - the physics, the science, the engineering to make it work. And we’ve gotten so good at it, air travel is now available to most people, it’s safe and convenient.
I’ve flown exactly three times in my life: a hot air balloon, a helicopter and a DC3. Each was magical in its own way. I’ve also done a fair bit of plane spotting. Seeing an Airbus A380 landing right in front of you is amazing. It really is the size of a large apartment block with wings. Truly awe inspiring.
Aviation is fucking awesome!
You’ve flown or you’ve flown in? Presumable the former, but I know people from where I’m from use flown to mean flown in. If you’ve only been airborne three times, and all in separate crafts, that’s something special in and of itself.
Flown in, as a passenger. I’d have said ‘piloted’ if I was the pilot.
And yes, that’s an odd trio of aircraft, considering most people only really fly on airliners. I’ve been on a Boeing 747 in a museum, but have never flown in an airliner.
I’ve only been in a helicopter once, but that was the coolest. Parasailing being pulled by a boat was also very fun.
I really enjoyed my helicopter ride as well - a sightseeing flight on vacation. That was on a Schweitzer S300; a small helicopter with a bench seat in the front. So you’re sitting right next to the pilot with an almost unobstructed forward vision. So cool. Definitely not something for people with a fear of heights.
The wings are crazy ! They look way too flimsy for what they do.
Next time you see an airplane, imagine a crane picking it up by the wings, around the middle of the wing length, and then start shaking it up.
It does not look like the wing will be able to hold that much weight.
Relevant Louis CK video.
that and about 223,378 pounds of jet fuel then it flies
https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?specid=1699
Steel beams are not gonna melt themselves.
steel beams don’t need to reach their melting point to deform and fail under structural stress
you want to really bend your brain about airplanes, go looknhow the air conditioning on a big jet works. the phrase “air pack” will help in your search. I don’t know which is more impressive, that it actually works or that someone thought of it.
Its all in those powerful engines
Not really. The thrust those engines produce is only about 1/3 the weight of the aircraft. It’s in part thanks to the engines for sure though.
You make it sound like 1/3 is a small number. That’s enough to accelerate the plane quickly and the speed is what generates lift.
I just meant that thrust is only 1/3rd the equation. The rest is the wings that convert thrust into lift at 3 to 1 ratio. And then there is all the systems that keep it controllable and safe etc… it’s a miracle machine really…
A few jobs back I was working was on a little learjet that had a .75 thirst to weight ratio. Now that was a fun jet. Now I have 54k lbs if thrust in a plane that weighs anywhere from 100-160k lbs.
