Flight Principles and Aircraft Operation

Understanding the principles by which an airplane flies is crucial to becoming a proficient pilot. Pilots log hundreds, even thousands of hours in aircraft of various types before they are considered to be proficient. Proficiency in aviation is not so much of an intellectual reward. Rather pilots who have logged thousands of hours and encountered unfavorable flying conditions are considered to be proficient. That

It is one thing to understand what forces act on an airplane and another to understand how the airplane is actually flown. To understand this we must first describe the various components of airplane structure. The largest component of an airplane is called the fuselage. The fuselage encompasses the pilots, all the passengers, all the flight controls and instruments, and luggage. It is essentially the cockpit of the airplane. However, on a larger scale the fuselage provides an attachment point for all of the other structural components of an airplane.

Daniel Bernoulli, the man for which Bernoulli’s Principle is named, made a discovery which aviation is dependent upon. His principle simply says that, “as the velocity of a fluid increases, its internal pressure decreases” (“Private,” 1996, p. 17). The fluid that we are concerned about in aviation is the air we breathe. Bernoulli’s findings allowed engineers to manipulate the shape of an airfoil in order to create these unequal pressures. The shape of an airfoil is somewhat difficult to describe. (“Private,” 1996)

Attached to the sides of the fuselage are the wings or airfoils. As mentioned previously, the wings are shaped such that a force referred to as lift is produced when the aircraft is moving forward. The wings may be attached to any point along the side of the fuselage. Their placement is what categorizes airplanes into high, mid, or low wing categories. In addition, airplanes may also have more than one set of wings. Airplanes with only one set are referred to as monoplanes. Those airplanes having two sets of wings are referred to as biplanes. In the case of biplanes, there are two wings on each side of the airplane; they are placed above one another (“Private,” 1996). The wing also has two very important control surfaces attached to its rear edge.

Lift is the force that acts upward on the airplane. The wing, often referred to as an airfoil, is the primary source of lift for airplanes. More specifically, the shape of the wing is responsible for the lift produced by airplanes. An airfoils shape allows the pressure exerted by air to be greater on the lower surface of the wing than on the top surface. Lift is only produced after the pressures acting on the top and bottom surface of an airfoil leave the state of equilibrium. Higher pressure being placed on the bottom of an airfoil will result in a net upward force, which is referred to as lift. To better understand why the pressures acting on an airfoil can leave the state of equilibrium we will refer to a principle discovered by a Swiss physicist.

How airplanes fly may be the most difficult aspect of aviation for people to understand. In aviation, we are basically concerned with four forces. Thrust, drag, lift, and weight are the four forces that act on airplanes and are often referred to as vectors. For our purposes it is easiest to pair these forces together. Thrust and drag oppose one another as does lift and weight. In order for us to understand these four forces thoroughly we must know how these forces originate. The first, and most important force acting on airplanes is that of lift.

The turbo-prop engine is basically a mix between a piston based powerplant and a turbine powerplant. A turbine engine is used to rotate a propeller at the front of the engine. This setup is much more expensive than a piston engine but provides much higher speeds and runs off of a different fuel. A full-blown turbine engine is the most expensive option and is usually not found on small, private airplanes. This is the most common type of engine used in commercial aviation and relies on thousands of tiny fan blades inside the engine to produce the thrust.

Some topics in this essay:
Control Surfaces, Bernoulli’s Principle, Flight Controls, Dimensions Flight, Forces Flight, Airplane Maneuvering, , Operation Understanding, Administration Regulations, Operation Maneuvering, “private” 1996, control surfaces, flight controls, longitudinal axis, maneuvering airplane, parasite drag, “instrument” 1995, third wheel, vertical axis, lift produced, drag interference drag, forces thrust drag, axis “instrument” 1995, strut oleo strut, pitch attitude airplane,