There's that stabilizer to complicate things.
sadly, never occurred to me to try.
> There's that stabilizer to complicate things.
True, getting the tailplane right is kind of key to a successful aircraft. but these would have been basically the same as the wings. so they may have provided some lift, and so some down-pitch?
I suspect that what's going on is that the center-of-gravity interacts with the center-of-lift to create a slight angle of attack regardless of what orientation the plane itself has. Then there is some unknown feedback loop that keeps that angle of attack from getting too large and stalling. It's not unlimited - if you make a paper airplane whose wings are too far forward or center of gravity is too far back, it will still stall - but it keeps most reasonable planes moving forward rather than down.
I loved playing with these things way back when (1960s) - the most frightening one was a model attached to a jetex rocket engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetex which after taking off immediately immolated itself, which I suppose is par for rocket powered aircraft, of any size.
You probably need to film the plane and nave an accurate horizontal reference to ensure the wing is perfectly horizontal.
(Disclaimer: I only made paper planes, but I never filmed them.)
I can conceive of more than a few mindless and random pursuits within Science that would save us a lot of money and heartache, if they were abandoned.
In helicopters it's easy to see, in planes people get all magical about it.
We get magical about lift because we don't actually understand it and we know we don't understand it.
The air is being accelerated downwards by the airplane. Newton's third law. To stay aloft, the airplane has to manufacture a counteracting force to gravity. And the only way to do that is by accelerating something downwards.
So, we can discuss whether or not the curvature of the airfoil matters, or the angle of attack matters, but the simple fact is that a lot of air has to be accelerated downwards somehow for the plane to stay up.
And the more magical descriptions of lift, including the broken Bernoulli airfoil model that was accepted for so long, are easy to discount once you focus on this important fact.
If you know better contradict me, but:
An inclined flat surface will push air down, creating pressure below, and create an empty area above, creating a partial vacuum pulling up.
Airfoils are used instead of flat surfaces because they eliminate turbulence by creating laminar airflow.
Regular planes are not built for flying upside down and have airfoils optimized for regular flight — the airfoil section we're all familiar with.
At an airshow once, a pilot showed me that on a plane built for acrobatics, the wing section is vertically symmetrical.
gnabgib•8mo ago