I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I’ve seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just… Soars… Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf… It’s crazy. With how much these things weigh, it’s insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we’re flying now. Like wow… Dude crazy.
Dafuq is this!? Stress testing?
Basically. The wings have to be able to bend that much so they don’t break off in strong winds or hard maneuvers.
No, every once in a while the planes need to stretch out. They get tired from being so stiff. This helps their joints later in their life span.
I hate that everybody’s like, it’s not that big a deal.
We only started doing it 124 years ago! Prior to that it was a very big deal indeed.
Everyone’s so fucking smart these days, there’s no room for a sense of wonder. It’s like being blasé and knowledgeable is cool. It’s really not.
You keep flying with your beautiful sense of wonder, Buttflapper!
I don’t need ignorance to feel wonder. I think things are cooler when I can marvel at the complex mechanics behind it all.
True. But I wasn’t arguing that.
What puts me in awe of things like flight isn’t the act itself, but the brilliance of the people who designed it to work. I look at the aerodynamic shape of an airfoil and think “we did that…humans”.
To be fair, we sorta knew it was possible because birds. I think it’s more impressive when we don’t know what can happen, like breaking the sound barrier or putting people in space.
Well fucking said. Smoke noodles rarely have room for curiosity, which is where new things often come from.
Edit: Not sure how smarmy know-it-alls became that, but I’m not changing it now
I’m pretty sure i can’t trust Arthur Vandelay, they are the kind of people that would pass off something they did as if it wasnt intentional
Some lady told me she read Atlas Shrugged while in the hospital for a long stay, kept alive by equipment she neither invented nor paid for. How oblivious people can be when we are all just barely something more than monkeys? Some of us manage to be passably unoblivious and I think that’s what makes us human; the potential to be more rational than a monkey. It’s no guarantee, though, as you so noted. You know there was a caveperson who just learned about fire and still went around and acted like he invented it straight up to the caveperson that did invent it. Monkey brain stuff.
That’s the thing though, what’s amazing about planes really depends on your knowledge base or what experience is specifically being enjoyed. If you don’t understand how planes work then the difference is moot because whether seeing or doing the entire thing is magical. If you do understand how planes work you might know that the crazy thing isn’t flight, we knew how to do that since approximately 1800 when the first gliders were built, the crazy part was generating enough power to make powered flight possible. If you understand how flight works and are still enjoying the experience of flight is where wonder still exists.
You know the wonder of flight still exists because some number of kids and adults would pick flight as a super power if given the choice.
I’m a mechanical engineer and have a general understanding of how wings work. I’ve flown many times. That shit still feels like magic to me.
I was most impressed by the sheer amount of power those engines put out when you finally take off. The acceleration gave me a boost of adrenaline when I flew for the first time (it was a Southwest Boeing 737)
And I can only imagine how they feel when empty.
Wait until you find out about electricity! 🤯
Computers is teachibg rocks to think
We grow flawless crystals, slice them into perfect disks, engrave billions of arcane runes onto them with magical potions and rays of light, animate them with lightning, and make them do our bidding.
And then we give them an “intelligence” that can’t even count the Rs in strawberry…
I think we’re doing pretty fucking well, all things considered.
engrave billions of arcane runes
Omg, you just made me love my job more.
Do you work in a fab? If so would love to know more about your work
Design, close to tape out now, but also post-silicon and bringup.
It’s fun as all fuck, never thought about it as incantations or runes, then the rock comes back and we cast spells to bring it to life I guess.
Takes a while but is just incredible.
Saw
this the other day, seems relevant to your commentTry looking at a die under a microscope
By filling them with lightning
And telephones! Even en old-school analogue phone is pretty amazing how sound becomes an electrical signal and then is converted back to sound at the other end.
Modern digital phones are just pure magic compared to analogue phones.
Magnets, how do they work?
Does anyone actually know? We have laws and math that predict and model behavior but last time I checked know one knew why.
I mean, big magnets work because they are made of electrons that have their magnetic fields aligned so they don’t cancel each other out. Now, as for why electrons have magnetic fields in the first place, that we don’t know
Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
tomato tomato =P
or magnets!
The wings are crazy ! They look way too flimsy for what they do.
Next time you see an airplane, imagine a crane picking it up by the wings, around the middle of the wing length, and then start shaking it up.
It does not look like the wing will be able to hold that much weight.
Relevant Louis CK video.
Don’t forget how high you get.
Last time I flew I didn’t get high at all. I must be doing something wrong.
Don’t you need to actually inhale?
Oxygen? Only if you want to keep being an alive person.
Bold assumption there. According to this formulation, I believe that the desired end goal is actually to be a “high” person. Which apparently only requires a 60 ton chunk of metal to make happen so…
And the one before?
ARE. OP is clearly very high right now.
If you get high enough, the idea of heavier-than-air objects not inevitably succumbing to gravity may fill you with wonder as well.
It’s simple. You just need 60 tons of lift and thrust. Aerodynamics help but you can make a brick fly.
see: The US Space Shuttle program
that and about 223,378 pounds of jet fuel then it flies
https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?specid=1699
Steel beams are not gonna melt themselves.
steel beams don’t need to reach their melting point to deform and fail under structural stress
it’s crazy that you can just jump, and you go up for a bit.
My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.
The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don’t see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn’t static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn’t move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn’t as I imagined, at those speeds it’s more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.
So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.
The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it’s more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it’s pretty much a bus.
In the air shows around here, they used to have a semi truck with some rockets strapped to the back that they’d race against a fighter jet.
The jet would come in low and when it crossed the starting line, the truck would take off from it.
The truck usually won.
Air shows might be big oil and military propaganda (that truck was owned and sponsored by Shell, iirc)…but damn if it wasn’t cool as hell.
I went to my second monster truck show a couple years ago. Took my nephew with me. The first time I was a kid and we had to leave because the noise made my bitch ass little brother cry.
They’ve come so far! They’re doing front flips now in those trucks! Highly recommend it for anyone. I was 39 at the time and I loved every minute.
Do you appreciate the company name Airbus because of this experience?
I think I would.
I think it would just make me smirk a little bit at myself whenever i remembered both of them at the same time
boy do I agree.
I fly a lot, and I think about this a lot. it’s absolutely nuts.
I saw a diagram once explaining how planes fly, this is a good explanation of that:
“Airplane wings are shaped to make air move faster over the top of the wing. When air moves faster, the pressure of the air decreases. So the pressure on the top of the wing is less than the pressure on the bottom of the wing. The difference in pressure creates a force on the wing that lifts the wing up into the air.”
so that’s floating around the back of my mind while I sit in my air chair and think:
"and there we are.
We are climbing into the air again in the big flexible metal tube.
The wings have flex and they almost look like they are flapping in the wind right there.
well, this is crazy again"
approximates my thought process each time I fly.
Yeah that’s mostly bullshit.
Your arm flies when you stick it out a window, and it isn’t shaped like shit, so does a piece of paper.
It’s basically like a sail, but horizontally instead of vertically, the onrushing air hits the bottom at an angle, is deflected down, and bumps the wing up.
The rest is just to try to reduce drag on the top (super-critical wings attempting to maximize laminar flow, or at least make the disconnection as far back as possible so turbulence creates the least drag on the wing.
I’m partial to the Newtonian explanation myself, I was explaining my interest the first time I saw an illustration of the Bernoulli principle.
in fact, I just wrote about The Newtonian explanation a few minutes ago:
"the Newtonian makes more practical end complete sense to me sense to me as an explanation for a lift.
maybe the confusion comes from calling the motion of pushing air down “lift”
push-off.
hm. what the heck is an appropriate antonym for lift…
spring-hold.
oh, buoyancy?
maybe we should switch our talk from lift to buoyancy.
rather than generating lift, velocity through the air generates aerodynamic buoyancy due to the increase in downward pressure, or rather the compressed air beneath the airfoil."
Sorry, as an engineer, this whole “shape of a birds wing makes air move faster over it” pisses me off to no end.
Airfoils are shaped the way they are for drag purposes, not whatever crazy things they say, we could make them like massive triangles and they would still work.
sure, i get it.
he did come up with that half explanation 250 what years ago, so I’ll give him a pass.
kind of a bummer that a half explanation is his most famous 'discovery" even though he did so much
No, yeah, Bernoulli was a genius who did a lot otherwise, he should be remembered for all his other scientific contributions…
But you fuck one goat…
If flying is crazy, then by the logic explained here today, controlled landings are even crazier.
I personally think rising is more impressive and spectacular than falling.
See, I think a controlled descent is more impressive. If you’re on the ground, and you want to be 5 feet in the air, but you fuck up and go 150 feet in the air instead, well…no big deal. Everybody on your plane is now screaming in fear, because it’s very noticable that their pilot is incompetant, but they ARE screaming. Because they’re alive.
But if you’re coming down, and the ground is 5 feet below you, and you fuck up and drive it 150 feet into the ground…the only people screaming are onlookers.
“OOOOH MY GODDDDDD!!! THAT PLANE JUST CRASHED AND BURST INTO A FIREBALL!!! EVERYBODYS DEAD!!! MEN! WOMEN! CHILDREN! EVEN BABIES!!! EVERYBODIES DEAD!!!”
And then the news does a report on how drunk the pilot was.
“THAT PLANE JUST CRASHED AND BURST INTO A FIREBALL!!!”
not the controlled landing that I was referring to, but I understand your comparison of the consequences.
“and the ground is 5 feet below you, and you fuck up and drive it 150 feet”
this is my favorite part of your scenario. a pilot literally less than a second from touching the ground glances out the window and thinks " well, just to make sure" and lunges forward, arms outstretched, pushing the joystick completely flat against the console hahaha.
Wait until you find out that probably wrong.
Its what we assumed for the last 100 odd years, but apparently in the last few we discovered they don’t actually work like that.
oh, go on.
i haven’t heard of the updated dynamics of flight.
This article does a pretty nice job of describing all the different theories
I just want to tell the void that I arrived at a similar conclusion about induced high and low pressure zones based on the wing “slicing” the air in half as if it was a continuous material causing cavitation above the wing, and was mocked for it.
thanks, that’s a good article.
That’s a great article, thanks for the read.
I don’t know why everybody focuses so much on the top of the wing. Relative to ambient air, the pressure above the wing is slightly reduced, but the pressure below the wing is massively increased. That massive increase is far more important than the slight reduction above.
We know this, because simple, flat airfoils are capable of flight. Think: paper airplanes, simple balsa models, etc.
The shape of the airfoil is not actually very important for lift. You can make a brick produce plenty enough lift to maintain its altitude, if you can provide sufficient thrust and control it’s attitude.
The specific shape of the airfoil is primarily important for minimizing drag across a variety of speeds and angles of attack at various loadings. This is where the top surface of the wing becomes important. By maintaining the flow over the wing, drag is reduced, and controllability is maintained.
yeah, I’m with you, the Newtonian makes more practical end complete sense to me sense to me as an explanation for a lift.
maybe the confusion comes from calling the motion of pushing air down “lift”
push-off.
hm. what the heck is an appropriate antonym for lift…
spring-hold.
oh, buoyancy?
maybe we should switch our talk from lift to buoyancy.
rather than generating lift, velocity through the air generates aerodynamic buoyancy due to the increase in downward pressure, or rather the compressed air beneath the airfoil.
I don’t know the full story, only that the fact air particles have to speed up over the top so they match up at the end is incorrect - one at the top, one at the bottom don’t actually arrive at the end at the same time. There is something missing.
This is wrong. Lift is generated from pressure difference. This pressure difference is caused by air moving faster over the top of the wing. I have no idea what you’re talking about with air particles matching up at the end.
I vaguely remember seeing a video that explained that how it’s usually explained is wrong. That’s what they’re probably referring to. But it wasn’t that we don’t actually know how it works, just that the common simplification is not technically correct (which happens often with these things).
Due to the nature of my work I’ve flown hundreds of passenger flights of all sizes and I still find myself in awe.
What a privilege to be able to actually see down from such a range of heights too. Where there is still lots of detail to be found, but you can also get an appreciation of scale. It’s honestly really amazing.
I used to think so until I realised that air and water are both fluids, except air is thinner.
To be clear to anyone with minds being blown: air is gas and gas is a type of fluid. Water is liquid and liquid is also a type of fluid.
… gas is a type of fluid.
that goes a long way in explaining some of those farts.
Exactly. Ever skip a stone on the surface of a lake? It’s like that, except it’s a continuous skip, with air instead of water, and you’re inside the stone.
That’s a bad analogy.
It was a joke.
That’s an awesome analogy.
I would be equally amazed to see something denser than water swimming.
Mythbusters has an episode where they swim in non-newtonian fluid
Ok, you have my attention, going googling.
That was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wiYtoG9kZE
Like a submarine?
Submarines work by manipulating their density, don’t they? Then they just float at whatever level matches their density.
Yeah, they’re more like dirigibles than airplanes. But same as airplanes, people have had a hard time believing that something made of metal can float.
it works because we believe in it. if everyone would lose faith in airplanes, they’d drop out of the sky.
Can I just lose faith in the private jets?
And will it fly higher if we have the Faith of the Heart?
easier yet, if everyone crams to the tail, it will likely crash
Is this true? Sounds true but I feel like this should also be a test they do to ensure it doesn’t fail.
WhhaaahhhHH!!!
