The plane is heavy and there’s gravity on earth. How does it just fly without falling down?
In: Physics
Step 1: It goes really fast.
Step 2: It has big flat wings that are tilted in such a way that the air hitting the wings gets directed downwards and the plane gets pushed up. You can feel this effect for yourself if you stick your hand out the window of a moving car. If you make your hand flat, how you tilt it changes whether your arm gets pushed up or down by the air.
Step 3: There’s some other stuff about how the “airfoil” shape of the wing effects things, but you don’t need to worry much about that at the ELI5 level. What I said above is the important bit.
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