Air Pressure Homeschool Science Experiment - How Airplanes Fly

Homeschool science education is fun! It is more fun when you can use things found around the house to demonstrate some naturally occurring phenomena such as air pressure. Flying a toy plane is every child's dream, and if it is combined with education, it can promote better understanding.

Before we go into the fun learning activities that you could co-ordinate with a homeschool science program, let me teach you some principles on which airplanes fly. There are some forces working on an airplane as it flies. They are the forces of thrust and drag and lift and gravity.
 
Thrust moves the airplane forward, and is provided by the jet engine and the propeller. Drag is a force of resistance that works in the opposite direction of thrust and slows down the airplane. Lift works in the upward direction and is produced by the wings. Gravity works in a direction opposite to the lift and pulls the plane down due to its weight. The right balance between these four forces keeps the plane flying.
 
Airplanes are shaped in such a way so as to minimize drag caused by air pressure, in order to allow them to glide smoothly. When air hits a moving object having a smaller area, it does not cause much resistance since there is less air pressure working on that object. On the other hand, when air hits a moving object with a larger area, it causes resistance as there is a higher pressure working on that object.
 
This is why airplanes are aerodynamically designed with cone-shaped noses so that the air pressure on the airplane body is reduced. This reduces drag and allows them to glide effortlessly through the air.
 
As an airplane moves with great speed on the runway, the wings are tilted upwards, increasing the air pressure on them. Therefore the airplane is lifted off the runway and rises higher. The angle of the wings determines how high the airplane will lift. In the same way, air pressure is used to maneuver the plane using the tail rudder.
 
You can blend the following fun activity with your homeschool science program. Buy a balsa wood toy airplane at your local store or drug store. As we assemble the airplane, we will experiment how it flies as we add each part.
 
To begin with, fly only the airplane body without the fins or wings. You will find that it is no better than a shoe flung in the air. The thrust is of no use, as it cannot make the right use of air pressure to fly.
 
Now attach only the large wing and fly the airplane. Your plane will seem to lift but then somersaults or plummets to the ground.

Next attach the horizontal stabilizer tail and fly it with a curve. You will notice that the somersaults have stopped but there is a zigzag movement.
 
Attach the vertical tail or rudder and now check out your toy airplane. This time you will notice a successful flying spell without any fishtail movements.
 
Here's something for you to figure out on your own. Fly the airplane without the metal nose clip and see what happens. What is the purpose of this metal clip?

how much fuel will aeroplane use per second...???

A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). According to Boeing's Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 liters per kilometer).

This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let's call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favorably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)!

Will Flying Cars Ever Become a Reality? Or Stay a Dream?

We have all seen movies or television adverts with people recreating flying cars, a selection of movies that point this out and the first to come to mind are back to the future and fifth element. But in all honesty will we ever see the like of these types of vehicles? They may be able to get into the development stage, but will society allow it? Or will the government allow them? As it may open a bucket load of worms for them, such as immigrants and potential terrorist flying over each country.

We have seen for along time cars trekking all along the grounds at tremendous speeds. So how would flying cars be planned out and developed over the long run? A blue print which I have read about states that authorities have one in the making, it looks more like a small private jet than a car. But is that the correct avenue to go down? If flying cars were to catch on they would have to be designed exactly like a normal looking car without the big wings or massive jets.

All this being said there could be another reality side of things, because to be honest every country has the airports to accommodate landing protocols and it would not be too hard at all to place custom regulations in the sky on the borders of each country. What I am mostly worried about though is the accidents and potential deaths that these types of vehicles may cause. As we already know there are around 20,000 major road accidents each year, with half of them ending up in life threatening positions.

If in fact there was an air collision it would not only kill the people in the air but it has the potential to kill innocent by passers on the ground.

So my decision in all honestly is that cars should strictly be kept on the ground, at least this way we will be able to control the abuse that motorists bring to themselves. Could you possibly imagine people drink driving in the sky? And then causing a pileup. With all the cars then falling to the ground, they could hit houses and buildings; it will be like one a meteorite hitting the earth every single day. So although we have the potential to create such machines the real flying should be left for the aeroplanes.

Future of Flight

Since the beginning of time, man has looked with longing at birds in the sky. It took about a thousand years to fulfil this dream- from the time of Abbas ibn Firnas in the 9th century - who managed to make short hops into the air - to the Wright Brothers, Wilbur and Orville in 1903, who finally managed to fly -covering a distance of 852 feet in 59 seconds. Just sixty-six years later in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin flew a distance of 380,000 km in 3 days, 3 hours, 49 minutes and stepped on to the moon. Thirty seven years later NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto took 8 hours, 35 minutes to cover the same distance- though it did not actually make a landing on the moon, but continued towards its destination 4.3 billion km away.

I recently read about an aeroplane that has been made by printing it out on a 3-D printer using plastic and nylon materials. What makes it even more amazing is that the whole aircraft could be assembled without tools in minutes, as the parts are attached together by snap fit techniques rather than nuts and bolts or glue. So far, the plane has only flown on autopilot, without a human pilot in its cockpit. However this can change very soon.

At a time when there is speculation about tourists going for weekend holidays into space, living in intergalactic hotels and spending their time looking for black holes- much in the way in which tourists today search for the elusive black panther - it is interesting to consider where aviation is headed. There are many different trajectories that this could take.

The most discussed option is the personal air vehicle or "flying cars" that could travel on roads but also take to the air when traffic got too heavy or roads were not available. Prototypes of such vehicles have been around for a number of years, but so far have not gone into mass production because of cost and safety issues. However, much work is going on in this field and there is speculation that a couple of flying cars are nearly in marketable stage. Given the growing popularity of electric cars in recent years, an electric flying car may well be on the cards, with propellers saving energy and charging the batteries on decent.

However, some of the biggest innovations are likely to be found in the field of commercial aviation. As passengers are getting more and more environment conscious, they want cleaner and greener aeroplanes that are less noisy, more energy efficient but also take them to their destination faster. Airbus has announced the possibility of launching a transparent plane that runs on solar energy by 2050, thus doing away with the scramble for window seats for a view. Whether or not this will make one feel safer in the air remains to be seen.

The big question remains whether we go for smaller planes that land closer to one's final destination, or larger ones that carry thousands of passengers into regional hubs. This approach will change the kind of airports that we need to build and the infrastructure that will be required. That the speed of planes is going to increase dramatically by approaching the speed of sound in the future is not a question; the question is whether they are really going to make the experience more enjoyable for the traveller.

But what happens beyond the horizon, beyond the time that it is clear that planes, airports and long waits between flights are bound to be a part of life. Is there the possibility that nano-technology and/or genomics change our views about flight and flying completely? Is there a possibility that humans grow wings and fly on their own, rather than in a vehicle, whatever its kind? Or maybe the idea that ibn Firnas had in the 9th century of attaching a pair of wings to his body to enable him to fly is the direction that we are likely to go in.