The first time you walk up to a Cessna 172 and peer into the cowling during preflight, you’re looking at an aircraft engine with roughly 180 horsepower worth of carefully balanced mechanical complexity. Cylinders, pistons, a crankshaft, spark plugs, magnetos, a carburetor or fuel injection system, oil lines, cooling baffles, and a propeller bolted to the front. It’s a lot.…
Here’s something that surprises almost everyone the first time they learn it: you don’t “steer” an airplane the same way you steer a car. In a car, you turn the steering wheel and the front wheels point in the new direction. The car follows. Simple and linear. In an airplane, you move a control wheel (or stick, depending on the…
Pull up a photo of any small airplane, like a Cessna, a Piper, a Diamond. Look at it for a moment. Now ask yourself: do you know what every single part does? Most people can point to the wings and the engine. After that, it gets fuzzy fast. What’s that fin at the tail? Why does it need both a…
In the Why Things Fly post, we explored the four forces that keep every airplane in the sky. But there’s a detail we glossed over. What determines whether a plane can fly fast or slow, land on short runways or need miles of pavement, and stall gently or drop like a rock? That detail is the airfoil: the specific cross-sectional…