physics of flight
Edgar Xiong
David Blackburn
Period 3
Physics of Flight
One may wonder, what is flight? Many just stare up into the blue skies above and assume. while others devote their lives to discovering and finding a passion in aviation. Flight can be simply characterized as the [powered] gliding of an object through the air, but the wonders of soaring through the air does not simply stop there, instead, flight is a whole myriad of forces acting on each other, as so found out by scientists decades ago.
In the early 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci fantasized the human species as being able to fly with a contraption, and so with that, he set off on a quest to find the answer by designing one radical plan after another, all leading to ultimate failure, but little did he know that his ingenious plans laid out the basic foundations for modern scientists alike, one of them being George Cayley, who took the study of flight even further, discovering the art of gliding flight by creating full-scale models of working gliders. When the news of Cayley’s work spread far and wide, Otto Lilienthal caught sight of this opportunity and documented Cayley’s flight, thus becoming the first human to ever recorded [gliding] flight, also earning him the nickname “Glider King.” Their work is credited when Orville and Wilbur Wright developed and flew the Wright Flyer I at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. The Wright brothers originally started out printing newspapers for the local community, but when they came across with a column on Cayley and Lilienthal’s amazing work, they started saving funds for their ever-growing and everlasting love for aviation. throughout 1901, 1902, they made numerous flight attempts with biplane gliders, with minor adjustments (i.e. adding a tail, curving wings to make dihedral angle, etc.) But it wasn’t until they funded for a wind tunnel did they figure out that if the wings itself thickened in the middle to form a “teardrop” form that sustained
David Blackburn
Period 3
Physics of Flight
One may wonder, what is flight? Many just stare up into the blue skies above and assume. while others devote their lives to discovering and finding a passion in aviation. Flight can be simply characterized as the [powered] gliding of an object through the air, but the wonders of soaring through the air does not simply stop there, instead, flight is a whole myriad of forces acting on each other, as so found out by scientists decades ago.
In the early 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci fantasized the human species as being able to fly with a contraption, and so with that, he set off on a quest to find the answer by designing one radical plan after another, all leading to ultimate failure, but little did he know that his ingenious plans laid out the basic foundations for modern scientists alike, one of them being George Cayley, who took the study of flight even further, discovering the art of gliding flight by creating full-scale models of working gliders. When the news of Cayley’s work spread far and wide, Otto Lilienthal caught sight of this opportunity and documented Cayley’s flight, thus becoming the first human to ever recorded [gliding] flight, also earning him the nickname “Glider King.” Their work is credited when Orville and Wilbur Wright developed and flew the Wright Flyer I at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. The Wright brothers originally started out printing newspapers for the local community, but when they came across with a column on Cayley and Lilienthal’s amazing work, they started saving funds for their ever-growing and everlasting love for aviation. throughout 1901, 1902, they made numerous flight attempts with biplane gliders, with minor adjustments (i.e. adding a tail, curving wings to make dihedral angle, etc.) But it wasn’t until they funded for a wind tunnel did they figure out that if the wings itself thickened in the middle to form a “teardrop” form that sustained
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