How do airplanes fly?

Reading time: 4 min

To understand how planes fly, we should be clear about the difference between the engines and the wings and the different jobs they do.

A plane’s engines are designed to move it forward at high speed. That makes air flow rapidly over the wings, which throw the air down toward the ground, generating an upward force called lift that overcomes the plane’s weight and holds it in the sky. So it’s the engines that move a plane forward, while the wings move it upward.

How do wings make lift?

In one sentence, wings make lift by changing the direction and pressure of the air that crashes into them as the engines shoot them through the sky.

Most airplane wings have a curved upper surface and a flatter lower surface, making a cross-sectional shape called an airfoil.

The curved shape of a wing creates an area of low pressure up above it; the air flow that hit the curve of the wing, it’s pulled to the top of the curve and then down, forcing the same amount of air molecules occupy more space thus, decreasing the air pressure above the wing. For exactly the opposite reason, the pressure of the air under the wing increases: the advancing wing squashes the air molecules in front of it into a smaller space. This inequality in air pressure creates a great rush of speed (like in a wind tunnel experiment), which is the primary way lift is generated.

When theses air molecules reach the end of the wing, where they’ll rush downward; this effect -known as downwash -causes lift in a second important way. The reason for this is that plane wings in fact aren’t horizontal but are slightly tilted backwards to hit the air at attack angle so that they’d cause a stronger lift.

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