Aerodynamic Forces

Before we dive into how wings keep airplanes up in the air, it is important that we take a
quick look at four basic aerodynamic forces: lift, weight, thrust and drag.

Straight and Level Flight

In order for an airplane to fly straight and level, the following relationships must be true:

• Thrust = Drag
• Lift = Weight

If, for any reason, the amount of drag becomes larger than the amount of thrust, the plane will
slow down. If the thrust is increased so that it is greater than the drag, the plane will speed up.

Similarly, if the amount of lift drops below the weight of the airplane, the plane will descend.
By increasing the lift, the pilot can make the airplane climb.

Thrust
Thrust is an aerodynamic force that must be created by an airplane in order to overcome the
drag (notice that thrust and drag act in opposite directions in the figure above). Airplanes
create thrust using propellers, jet engines or rockets. In the figure above, the thrust is being
created with a propeller, which acts like a very powerful version of a household fan, pulling
air past the blades.

Drag
Drag is an aerodynamic force that resists the motion of an object moving through a fluid (air
and water are both fluids). If you stick your hand out of a car window while moving, you will
experience a very simple demonstration of this effect. The amount of drag that your hand
creates depends on a few factors, such as the size of your hand, the speed of the car and the
density of the air. If you were to slow down, you would notice that the drag on your hand
would decrease.

We see another example of drag reduction when we watch downhill skiers in the Olympics.
You'll notice that, whenever they get the chance, they will squeeze down into a tight crouch.
By making themselves "smaller," they decrease the drag they create, which allows them to
move faster down the hill.
If you've ever wondered why, after takeoff, a passenger jet always retracts its landing gear
(wheels) into the body of the airplane, the answer (as you may have already guessed) is to
reduce drag. Just like the downhill skier, the pilot wants to make the aircraft as small as
possible to reduce drag. The amount of drag produced by the landing gear of a jet is so great
that, at cruising speeds, the gear would be ripped right off of the plane.

Weight
This one is the easiest. Every object on earth has weight (including air). A 747 can weigh up
to 870,000 pounds (that's 435 tons!) and still manage to get off the runway. (See the table
below for more 747 specs!)

Lift
Lift is the aerodynamic force that holds an airplane in the air, and is probably the trickiest of
the four aerodynamic forces to explain without using a lot of math. On airplanes, most of the
lift required to keep the plane aloft is created by the wings (although some is created by other
parts of the structure).

747-400 Facts
• Length: 232 feet (~ 71 meters)
• Height: 63 feet (~ 19 meters)
• Wingspan: 211 feet (~ 64 meters)
• Wing area: 5,650 square feet (~ 525 square meters)
• Max. takeoff weight: 870,000 pounds (~ 394,625 kilograms)
• Max. landing weight: 630,000 pounds (~ 285,763 kilograms)
(explains why planes may need to dump fuel for emergency
landings)
• Engines: four turbofan engines, 57,000 pounds of thrust each
• Fuel capacity: up to 57,000 gallons (~ 215,768 liters)
• Max. range: 7,200 nautical miles
• Cruising speed: 490 knots
• Takeoff distance: 10,500 feet (~ 3,200 meters)

A Few Words About Fluid

A principal concept in aerodynamics is the idea that air is a fluid. Like all gases, air flows
and behaves in a similar manner to water and other liquids. Even though air, water and
pancake syrup may seem like very different substances, they all conform to the same set of
mathematical relationships. In fact, basic aerodynamic tests are sometimes performed
underwater.

Another important concept is the fact that lift can exist only in the presence of a moving
fluid. This is also true for drag. It doesn't matter if the object is stationary and the fluid is
moving, or if the fluid is still and the object is moving through it. What really matters is the
relative difference in speeds between the object and the fluid.

Consequently, neither lift nor drag can be created in space (where there is no fluid). This
explains why spacecraft don't have wings unless the spaceship spends at least some of its time
in air. The space shuttle is a good example of a spacecraft that spends most of its time in
space, where there is no air that can be used to create lift. However, when the shuttle re-enters
the earth's atmosphere, its stubby wings produce enough lift to allow the shuttle to glide to a
graceful landing.

Popular (and Imperfect) Explanations of Lift Creation

If you read any college-level aerodynamics textbook, you will find plenty of mathematical
methods for calculating lift. Unfortunately, none of these explanations are particularly
satisfying unless you have a Ph.D. in mathematics. (Click here for a demo of an online
aerodynamics textbook from Stanford University.)

There are many simplified explanations of lift that appear on the Internet and in some
textbooks. Two of the most popular explanations today are the Longer Path explanation
(also known as the Bernoulli or equal transit time explanation) and the Newtonian
explanation (also known as the momentum transfer or air deflection explanation). While
many versions of these explanations are fundamentally flawed, they can still contribute to an
intuitive understanding of how lift is created.

The Longer Path Explanation

What is it?
The Longer Path explanation holds that the top surface of a wing is more curved than the
bottom surface. Air particles that approach the leading edge of the wing must travel either
over or under the wing. Let's assume that two nearby particles split up at the leading edge, and
then come back together at the trailing edge of the wing. Since the particle traveling over the
top goes a longer distance in the same amount of time, it must be traveling faster.

Bernoulli's equation, a fundamental of fluid dynamics, states that as the speed of a fluid flow
increases, its pressure decreases. The Longer Path explanation deduces that this faster moving
air develops a lower pressure on the top surface, while the slower moving air maintains a
higher pressure on the bottom surface. This pressure difference essentially "sucks" the wing
upward (or pushes the wing upward, depending on your point of view).

Why is it not entirely correct?

There are several flaws in this theory, although this is a very common explanation found in
high school textbooks and even encyclopedias:

1. The assumption that the two air particles described above rejoin each other at the
trailing edge of the wing is groundless. In fact, these two air particles have no
"knowledge" of each other's presence at all, and there is no logical reason why these
particles should end up at the rear of the wing at the same moment in time.
2. For many types of wings, the top surface is longer than the bottom. However, many
wings are symmetric (shaped identically on the top and bottom surfaces). This
explanation also predicts that planes should not be able to fly upside down, although
we know that many planes have this ability.
Why is it not entirely wrong?
The Longer Path explanation is correct in more than one way. First, the air on the top surface
of the wing actually does move faster than the air on the bottom -- in fact, it is moving faster
than the speed required for the top and bottom air particles to reunite, as many people suggest.
Second, the overall pressure on the top of a lift-producing wing is lower than that on the
bottom of the wing, and it is this net pressure difference that creates the lifting force.

The Newtonian Explanation

What is it?
Isaac Newton stated that for every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction (Newton's
Third Law). You can see a good example of this by watching two skaters at an ice rink. If one
pushes on the other, both move -- one due to the action force and the other due to the reaction
force.

In the late 1600s, Isaac Newton theorized that air molecules behave like individual particles,
and that the air hitting the bottom surface of a wing behaves like shotgun pellets bouncing off
a metal plate. Each individual particle bounces off the bottom surface of the wing and is
deflected downward. As the particles strike the bottom surface of the wing, they impart some
of their momentum to the wing, thus incrementally nudging the wing upward with every
molecular impact.

Note: Actually, Newton's theories on fluids were developed for naval warfare, in order to help
decrease the resistance that ships encounter in the water -- the goal was to build a faster boat,
not a better airplane. Still, the theories are applicable, since water and air are both fluids.

Why is it not entirely correct?

The Newtonian explanation provides a pretty intuitive picture of how the wing turns the air
flowing past it, with a couple of exceptions:

1. The top surface of the wing is left completely out of the picture. The top surface of a
wing contributes greatly to turning the fluid flow. When only the bottom surface of the
wing is considered, the resulting lift calculations are very inaccurate.
2. Almost a hundred years after Newton's theory of ship hulls, a man named Leonhard
Euler noticed that fluid moving toward an object will actually deflect before it even
hits the surface, so it doesn't get a chance to bounce off the surface at all. It seemed
that air did not behave like individual shotgun pellets after all. Instead, air molecules
interact and influence each other in a way that is difficult to predict using simplified
methods. This influence also extends far beyond the air immediately surrounding the
wing.

Why is it not entirely wrong?

While a pure Newtonian explanation does not produce accurate estimates of lift values in
normal flight conditions (for example, a passenger jet's flight), it predicts lift for certain flight
regimes very well. For hypersonic flight conditions (speeds exceeding five times the speed of
sound), the Newtonian theory holds true. At high speeds and very low air densities, air
molecules behave much more like the pellets that Newton spoke of. The space shuttle
operates under these conditions during its re-entry phase.

Unlike the Longer Path explanation, the Newtonian approach predicts that the air is deflected
downward as it passes the wing. While this may not be due to molecules bouncing off the
bottom of the wing, the air is certainly deflected downward, resulting in a phenomenon called
downwash. (Click here for more on downwash.)

How Lift is Created

Pressure Variations Caused By Turning a Moving Fluid
Lift is a force on a wing (or any other solid object) immersed in a moving fluid, and it acts
perpendicular to the flow of the fluid. (Drag is the same thing, but acts parallel to the direction
of the fluid flow). The net force is created by pressure differences brought about by variations
in speed of the air at all points around the wing. These velocity variations are caused by the
disruption and turning of the air flowing past the wing. The measured pressure distribution on
a typical wing looks like the following diagram:

A. Air approaching the top surface of the wing is compressed into the air above it as it
moves upward. Then, as the top surface curves downward and away from the
airstream, a low-pressure area is developed and the air above is pulled downward
toward the back of the wing.

B. Air approaching the bottom surface of the wing is slowed, compressed and
redirected in a downward path. As the air nears the rear of the wing, its speed and
pressure gradually match that of the air coming over the top. The overall pressure
effects encountered on the bottom of the wing are generally less pronounced than
those on the top of the wing.

C. Lift component

D. Net force

E. Drag component

When you sum up all the pressures acting on the wing (all the way around), you end up with a
net force on the wing. A portion of this lift goes into lifting the wing (lift component), and
the rest goes into slowing the wing down (drag component). As the amount of airflow turned
by a given wing is increased, the speed and pressure differences between the top and bottom
surfaces become more pronounced, and this increases the lift. There are many ways to
increase the lift of a wing, such as increasing the angle of attack or increasing the speed of the
airflow. These methods and others are discussed in more detail later in this article.

It is important to realize that, unlike in the two popular explanations described earlier, lift
depends on significant contributions from both the top and bottom wing surfaces. While
neither of these explanations is perfect, they both hold some nuggets of validity. Other
explanations hold that the unequal pressure distributions cause the flow deflection, and still
others state that the exact opposite is true. In either case, it is clear that this is not a subject
that can be explained easily using simplified theories.

Likewise, predicting the amount of lift created by wings has been an equally challenging task
for engineers and designers in the past. In fact, for years, we have relied heavily on
experimental data collected 70 to 80 years ago to aid in our initial designs of wings.

Calculating Lift Based on Experimental Test Results

In 1915, the U.S. Congress created the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA
-- a precursor of NASA). During the 1920s and 1930s, NACA conducted extensive wind
tunnel tests on hundreds of airfoil shapes (wing cross-sectional shapes). The data collected
allows engineers to predictably calculate the amount of lift and drag that airfoils can develop
in various flight conditions.

The lift coefficient of an airfoil is a number that relates its lift-producing capability to air
speed, air density, wing area and angle of attack -- the angle at which the airfoil is oriented
with respect to the oncoming air flow (we'll discuss this in greater detail later in the article).
The lift coefficient of a given airfoil depends upon the angle of attack.

Image courtesy NASA

The lift-curve slope of a NACA airfoil

Here is the standard equation for calculating lift using a lift coefficient:
 L = lift
Cl = lift coefficient
(rho) = air density
V = air velocity
A = wing area

As an example, let's calculate the lift of an airplane with a wingspan of 40 feet and a chord
length of 4 feet (wing area = 160 sq. ft.), moving at a speed of 100 mph (161 kph) at sea level
(that's 147 feet, or 45 meters, per second!). Let's assume that the wing has a constant cross-
section using an NACA 1408 airfoil shape, and that the plane is flying so that the angle of
attack of the wing is 4 degrees.

We know that:

• A = 160 square feet

• (rho) = 0.0023769 slugs / cubic foot (at sea level on a standard day)
• V = 147 feet per second
• Cl = 0.55 (lift coefficient for NACA 1408 airfoil at 4 degrees AOA)

So let's calculate the lift:

• Lift = 0.55 x .5 x .0023769 x 147 x 147 x 160

• Lift = 2,260 lbs