So i worked on a ship and i know we had various tanks that could be filled and emptied to modify our CoG
in an airplane that could be extremely dangerous and could have several thousand kilo’s of sewage after a long flight how do they maintain such a critical factor for flight?
EDIT:
I understand that flying is different from floating i was merely using it as an example of a system i knew and how it worked
In: 8
Main reason that it’s easier on a plane than on a ship: plane is flying, not floating.
When a plane flies, there’s a lot of air that you can redirect with control surfaces, aka ailerons ruder and elevator, and the big boy, the horizontal stabilizer. The huge tail plane or horizontal stabilizer, is pushing the tail down all the time while the front of the plane is heavier than the rear. This is done on purpose as the plane will nose down automatically if you stall a wing. It makes flight safe. Now, the horizontal stabilizer is. It fix, you can move the entire huge thing 3 degrees up (pushes nose down) and 10 degrees down (pushes nose up). That’s an enormous amount and it allows you to trim the plane with a very big force. This is enough to compensate wide shifts in weight fed or aft.
For roll, you have ailerons at the wing tips and all the variables weight very close to centerline (aircraft body is quite narrow compared to wings). Ailerons can easily compensate for a lot of things.
If things go sour in the roll department, you can transfer fuel between left and right wing tanks, that’s around 5-80k pounds.
Take all of this, and all you need is to load the aircraft to take off with a proper center of gravity, with the goal to have the plane fly perfectly balanced with all the above corrections set to neutral.
At this point, you can use all of the above corrections to restore a balance. These corrections are sized to deal with engine loss, wing icing, bad weather, and structural damages like losing an entire landing gear (up to 3000kg), or an engine detaching from the plane. You can’t poop enough to get to that scale of asymmetry, but you can try.
Las point: poop is stored close to the toilet and freshwater too. In theory one is emptying and the other is filling.
I get why you ask, on a boat you have a lot more balance issues, less ways to address it and the free surface effect that may allow massive shifts in center of mass during a flood. So I bet you have to create proper safety margins and keep adjusting your ship to keep it perfectly at the safest balance point.
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