Four forces of flight

From Shawn

Hello again and welcome to my second blog post regarding the four forces that affects flight, in this second post, we will look at the first two of four forces that has an effect on flight, this is a continuation from the post I did a few weeks ago regarding aerodynamics and its concepts.  As we have discussed in my previous post, aerodynamics plays an important role in our lives and one of those role is in the form of transportation. One of the vital forms of transportation in our lives is air travel, and air travel is dependent on the factor of flight, therefore today we will explore the four forces that allows flight to be possible. Keep in mind that the units for all these forces are in Newtons (N)

Weight:  The force of gravity acting upon an object, this force usually acts downwards as the object will be pulled with a force towards the centre of the Earth due to the attraction of Earth’s gravity.  For flight to be possible, this weight has to be countered greatly by an opposing force when the aircraft is taking off or flying in the air.

Lift: The force that causes an upward movement in the aircraft, the force acts upwards against the weight of the aircraft, and when the force caused by the lift is greater than the aircraft’s weight, this would result in the aircraft lifting off or increasing in altitude. In an Aeroplane, the lift is caused by the shape of the aircraft’s wings.

Lift in an Aeroplane’s wings: The shape of the aircraft’s wings are designed to change air pressure when in flight, it is able to do this because the top of the wing is curved more and the bottom of the wing is more flat, this causes air to flow over the top part of the wing much more efficiently than the bottom part. The result of this shape causes the air pressure on the top of the wing to be lower than the air pressure below the wing, therefore an upward movement would be caused due to the difference in pressure between the top and bottom parts of the wing.