Eli5: How can a plane try and do a touch and go landing?

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You know when planes try to land and a problem arises, how have they got enough lift to immediately take off again? Isn’t that the purpose of the run up to taking off (normally)?

In: Engineering

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pilot ‘puts the pedal to the metal’, increasing the engines’ thrust, the plane’s speed, and thus the wings’ lift. On approach to landing, the plane had nearly enough lift to maintain altitude, so increasing lift a bit gets it going back up instead of down.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Airspeed. As you’d expect they already have lots of momentum while ‘rolling’ down the runway so they need less room to accelerate back up to a high enough speed to lift off(by having enough air moving quickly enough over the wings to create more lift than there is gravity pulling the plane down)

Anonymous 0 Comments

After touchdown we are still pretty close to the airspeed needed to takeoff again. All we need to do is push the throttles forward to takeoff power, gain a little of that airspeed back to get us back to rotation speed, and there you go. You should never be losing too much of your airspeed in the roll after touchdown when you’re doing a touch and go. You want to be pretty quick on reconfiguring and pushing those throttles up again before you eat up too much runway and lose too much airspeed.