Get Off The Ground
In October 2021, a private jet failed to takeoff from the Houston Executive Airport. It crashed into a powerline without ever leaving the ground. Luckily, everyone survived. An article from Aerotime, a publication about aviation, reported that it failed to deploy its elevators, which is one of its most basic tools to get into the sky. According to a NASA article, air has weight, and if pilots can’t manipulate these molecules properly, they can’t fly. To fully understand this, you must know the three key steps to takeoff: Speed, widening the wing, and deploying the elevators.
Step One: Speed
Pilot Ali Asghar says in a YouTube video that airplanes need to generate lift, the force that picks an object off the ground. One way to generate lift is to increase speed. Force is a push or a pull on an object. The Federal Aviation Authority talks about Newton’s Second Law of Motion, which states that any force equals mass times acceleration. To defy the force of gravity, a plane must create a new force by speeding up so much that it overcomes this weight, or mass.
Speed also makes air pressure lower, which means air molecules are more separated, so they’re not weighing down on the plane as much. However, if pilots relied on speed alone, it would take a long time and many miles of runway to get off the ground, which is why they need to change the shape of the wing too.
Step Two: Widening the Wing
Once the plane is accelerating, the flaps on the back of the wing and the slats on the front are deployed by pulling a lever forward, which makes the wing wider and curve like a rainbow. Sabins Civil Engineering, an engineering educational YouTube channel, says this curve in the wing traps air molecules underneath and not on top, pushing the plane upwards.
The more air molecules that are bundled together, the more powerful they get. Air molecules can work a lot like the audience in crowd surfing: there needs to be people underneath that push one party animal up to the sky, the more people there are below, the easier it is. While the speed and the shape of the wing help, something more is needed to get the plane airborne: the plane needs to tip towards the sky.
Step Three: The Elevators
The elevators are flaps on the tail wing that must create the “angle of attack,” which is the 15-degree diagonal that the plane must stay at to keep rising into the sky. This way, it can continue to trap air molecules underneath its belly and wings while also going upwards.
There is a gauge on the plane called the “airspeed indicator.” It tells the pilot if the speed and the shape of the wing have created enough lift for the final phase: pitching to the sky. At this time, the elevators come out and curve upwards. This curve makes more air molecules bundle on top of the tail wing than on the bottom, forcing the tail of the plane down, and making the nose point up. The air molecules on the elevators are like one man sitting on a teeter totter: he goes to the ground and forces the other side to shoot up.
If a plane doesn’t have these basic mechanisms working, it cannot leave the ground. The elevators are the crucial factor that gets the plane airborne. Without them, you get the 2021 crash in Houston. Without them, you would never know what it’s like to be soaring in the sky.