Eli5 : How do boomerang work?

Question

I don’t understand how they work ? Is it a particular wood that makes it come back or anything can be a boomerang?

Thanks a lot !

In: Physics

Answer 1

You can buy plastic boomerangs, the material just needs to be light and fairly stiff.

The boomerang basically forms a wing but because it is spinning one side of it is creating more lift (spinning = one side opposite speed to the other, add that to your forward motion and it means one side is faster than the other). This causes it to turn. It “comes back” because it usually runs out of energy before it can make a 360 turn but a 180 turn is pretty easy