How does a boomerang return to you after you throw it?
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I used to have boomerangs as a teen. You have to practice for a while the exact angle you throw it at. You should throw it straight, like a knife if you will. In cartoons people are pictured throwing them sideways but that’s not the right way.
It’s like rolling a ball up a hill with rotation so that it makes the desired arc. Instead of a hill the boomerang is riding a wave of dense air its wings create.
Wait, it’s suppose to return to you? I always thought it’s suppose to break windows
A boomerang has two wings that are shaped into airfoils so that they generate lift when it spins the way a propeller does. When it is thrown one wing will generate more lift than the other because the airflow over it is added to the airflow from it’s spin while the other has it subtracted. This uneven lift would tend tip the ‘rang over but because it is spinning another force comes into play that as I write this has yet to be mentioned; [gyroscopic precession](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZGdvJQnPU)
When the unequal lift attempts rotate the axis of spin of the ‘rang, precession turns it at a right angle causing the ‘rang to fly in a turning path. The higher the forward speed the greater the unequal lift the harder the turn. This result in a well made and well thrown ‘rang returning to the thrower and settling into a helicopter like descent to be caught.
Wasn’t the boomerang originally a throwing weapon to hunt small game? What would be the advantage of it coming back to you if you were trying to hit an animal with it? If you miss the animal it is just going to hit the ground. Or was it always just a cool toy?
What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
A boomerang has two or more airfoil lifting surfaces. When you throw it, you spin it. That means the wing going forward generates a bit more lift than the wing going backwards because the air is flowing over the wing just a little bit faster. Because a boomerang is spinning, it behaves like a gyroscope. Gyroscopes are weird counterintuitive things. If you apply a turning force, a torque, to a gyroscope, where the axis of torque is at right angles to the axis the gyroscope is spinning, the result is the gyroscope axis shifts towards an axis that is at right angles to both the initial spinning axis and the axis of the applied torque. The torque generated by the differential lift causes the boomerang to therefore curve in flight and eventually come back to where you start. [This guy](http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh1/boomerangs.htm) has all the info you ever want to know about how boomerangs work.
You know how planes can fly but also turn in the sky? Well if the pilot kept turning left it would eventually return to where it started.
Same idea, a spinning boomerang creates life like a wing but points slightly to the right/left, so it arcs back to the starting point
Have you ever seen those little seeds that fall from trees that look like a propellor falling down? It spins, but it also falls down in a circular shape.
Now imagine you make it 10 times bigger/heavier, and throw it sideways. It does the exact same thing but in a wider circle.
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