At first glance, sailboats don’t look much like an airplane, but physics-wise, they’re closely related. Both the sail and hull of a sailboat act like wings turned on their side. Keep reading
Tag: wingtip vortices
The Best of FYFD 2020
2020 was certainly a strange year, and I confess that I mostly want to congratulate all of us for making it through and then look forward to a better, happier, Keep reading
Contrails From 4 Engines
The wingtip vortices of aircraft provide a veritable cornucopia of gorgeous imagery. There’s something inherently fascinating about these vortices that stretch behind moving aircraft. But four-engine aircraft add an extra Keep reading
Gliding Birds Get Extra Lift From Their Tails
Gorgeous new research highlights some of the differences between fixed-wing flight and birds. Researchers trained a barn owl, tawny owl, and goshawk to glide through a cloud of helium-filled bubbles Keep reading
Vortices and Ground Effect
Though typically unseen, the vortices that swirl from the tips of aircraft wings are powerful. Here you see a Hawker Sea Fury equipped with a smoke system used to visualize Keep reading
Seeing the Wake
Hot exhaust gases churn in the wake of this climbing B-1B Lancer. The high temperature of the exhaust changes the density and, thus, the refractive index of the gases relative Keep reading
Sunset Vortices
Often our atmosphere’s transparency masks the beautiful flows around us. This spectacular image shows a flight landing in Munich just after sunrise. Low-hanging clouds get sliced by the airplane’s passage Keep reading
Quad Copter Schlieren
Schlieren photography is a classic method of flow visualization that utilizes small variations in density (or temperature) to make otherwise unseen air motion visible. Because changing air’s density or temperature Keep reading
Crow Instability
Watching airplane contrails overhead, you may have noticed them transform into a daisy chain of distorted rings. This is an effect known as the Crow instability. The contrails themselves are Keep reading
Wingtip Vortices Visualized
In flight, airplane wings produce dramatic wingtip vortices. These vortices reduce the amount of lift a 3D wing produces relative to a 2D one. How much they influence the lift Keep reading