Why do airplanes fly? This animation explains it in five minutes.
It's not just magic. Airplanes can take flight and travel up to 13,000 kilometers without refueling because there are a series of aerodynamic principles and mechanical devices that allow it. Five minutes are enough to begin to understand why we are able to fly.
To begin with, a little physics. There are four forces that act on the plane during the flight: resistance ➡, thrust ⬅, lift ⬆ and weight ⬇. They act in pairs: the resistance is opposite to the thrust and the lift is opposite to the weight. When the aircraft stays afloat, push = resistance and lift = weight, so the net force equals zero. We go by parties.
Resistance is the force acting in the opposite direction to the movement of an object in the fluid that surrounds it, in this case the air. The energy we use to propel the plane through the air generates a resistance that slows down (it is easy to notice this force if you take your hand out the window of a moving car). Planes fold the landing gear after takeoff to reduce its air resistance.
The push or pull is the force that makes the plane advance and counteract the resistance to air. Commercial aircraft use jet engines, but there are also propeller aircraft and others that use rockets as propulsion. A jet engine or jet engine discharges a jet of gas to generate the thrust with the help of Newton's third law: the gas, which is ejected backwards at high speed, pushes the engine forward, which makes the plane advance .
The main part of an airplane is its wings, because they produce the lifting force that allows it to fly. For this they are designed with a special aerodynamic profile called airfoil. When moving through the air, the wings deflect the air to its lower part. With a much higher air pressure than above, the wings generate the lift force that lifts the aircraft during takeoff and keeps it afloat during the flight. In the air, the net force is zero because the lift is equal to the weight of the aircraft, which includes gravity.
On the tail of the plane are the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical stabilizer. They are elements that ensure the stability of the plane; that is, its tendency to return to an initial state after a disturbance. The horizontal is responsible for stabilizing the movements from top to bottom of the nose of the plane (lateral axis) and the vertical movements from left to right (vertical axis).