How & Why

Want to learn how aviation things work? You’ve come to the right place to find out.

Build an A380 in 7 minutes

Continuing on from our previous post showing time-lapse footage of airliner construction, enjoy this extended 7 minute version showing the construction of the world’s largest aircraft, the Airbus A380…

How The Wing REALLY works

You’d think, after more than 100 years of powered flight, and many more years than that if you count human experiments with gliders, that there would be no debate about exactly how an aircraft wing works. Yet the debate continues! Before you get all freaked-out, let me reassure you… nobody believes that it is...

The Science of Supersonic Freefall

As a follow-up to our article on Joe Kittinger: Supersonic Parachutist, holder of the parachuting altitude record for over 50 years, we present this video explaining some of the problems encountered by people attempting to break this record. Felix Baumgartner, who plans on making the attempt, is being assisted by Joe Kittinger (who also appears...

Aviation company GE Aviation has added a simple and yet fun “Design Your Own Plane” game to their website. In this game you can experiment with different wing, engine and fuselage options to try to build an optimum airplane. Then, when you think you’ve come up with the perfect plane, click a button and...

Revealed! How Bumblebees Fly

We can now reveal the secret of how bumblebees fly. From a scientific standpoint, flight for bumblebees has long been considered as aerodynamically impossible, their tiny wings being too small to support the weight of their bodies. And yet they fly — which clearly shows that we don’t know everything about everything. Courtesy of...

For every action… Newton’s 3rd law is a biggy… Jet engines rely on this principle to power our airliners through the sky. Airlines would be Groundlines without it! In scientific lingo, Newton’s 3rd Law says: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But what does this mean? Let me say...