I understand that the wing of the plane creates downforce, lifting the plane into the air, so how do planes fly upside-down? Wouldn’t the wings start pushing the plane down into the ground once flipped?
In: 373
First we have to fix the question:
>understand that the wing of the plane creates downforce
It does not. Downforce is what sports cars have. Effectively, they’re upside-down airplane wings. They push the car into the ground, rather than make it fly. What planes do, is simple “up-force”. Now for the answer:
A plane can, in effect, transform its wings during flight. It used to be that they twisted the entire wing, but now they do it with ailerons instead (Thanks Tom Scott). For instance, when pitching down, what you are effectively doing is making the wings create downforce instead of upforce. So it goes to reason that if you turn the plane up-side down, and pitched “down”, what would otherwise be downforce is now creating upforce again, making it able to fly like normal
Latest Answers