A plane needs balance to be stable. When it has two wings, it has lift on both sides, and it is pushed straight up into the air. But if you remove one wing, suddenly the plane is out of balance. It would have a huge weight in the middle and lift on only one side, causing the plane to lift unevenly, and stall.
1. Can a passenger plane fly with just one wing or upside down? “An airplane cannot stay in the air with just one wing. Both wings are necessary to provide enough lifting power for the plane to stay in the air.
The free flight experiments showed that flies are capable of compensating for large damage to one wing, which they achieve by rolling their body towards the damaged wing and adjusting wing motion (figure 2; electronic supplementary material, movies S1–S4, see Muijres et al.
Only if the wing is stretched from one side of the plane to the other, in a way that the plane is located in the middle, it can fly with one wing. This means, in the current technology and how plane wings work, it is impossible to fly with only one wing at one side.
The plane was flying at an altitude of 36,000 feet when the portion of the wing, known as a winglet, was lost.
Typically, when birds will collide with an aircraft's airframe, it is unlikely to cause significant problems for the pilots flying. But there are cases — like the ones that happened on Sunday — where the aircraft engine ingested the birds causing damage to the power plants.
From a practical point, no, a modern airliner will not lose a wing due to turbulence. Modern airlines are very tough and designed to withstand extreme turbulence.
Sitting next to an exit row will always provide you with the fastest exit in the case of an emergency, granted there's no fire on that side. But the wings of a plane store fuel, so this disqualifies the middle exit rows as the safest row option.
It is also logical. Sitting next to a row where the exit is will always give you the quickest exit in an emergency, provided there is no fire on that side. But an airplane's wings store fuel, which disqualifies centre exit rows as the safest row option.
Techincally, there is only one way for the aircraft to remain hanging motionless in the air: if weight and lift cancel each other out perfectly, and at the same time thrust and drag cancel each other out too. But this is incredibly rare. To stay in the air and sustain its flight, an aircraft needs to be moving forward.
In a particularly turbulent storm, some may imagine that the wings bend so much, they could snap off. However that scenario is almost impossible. The entire aircraft is basically designed to allow the wings to bend in turbulence without compromising any structural integrity.
The flies, they found, receive pain messages via sensory neurons in their ventral nerve cord, the insect equivalent of a spinal cord. Along this nerve cord are inhibitory neurons that act as gatekeepers, allowing pain signals through or blocking them based on context.
A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single mainplane, in contrast to a biplane or other types of multiplanes, which have multiple planes.
By wing-drop stall we mean a stall where one wing stalls before the other. The wing that reaches the critical angle first (at about 15 degrees) will stall first, losing lift and causing a roll at the stall.
Pilots with useful vision in only one eye may obtain medical certification upon demonstrating the ability to compensate for the loss of binocular vision and to perform airman duties without compromising aviation safety.
Although not common, there have been four-winged planes, or quadruplanes. Great Britian, in World War I, even went as far as making a quadruplane fighter called the Armstrong Whitworth F.K. 10. The benefit of having four wings is more lift than two wings, but there will also be more drag.
Takeoff and landing are widely considered the most dangerous parts of a flight.
Plane crashes are extremely rare. The odds of dying in a plane are about 1 in 205,552. If you want to feel safer, some seats that have a better track record during crashes than others.
The middle seat in the final seat is your safest bet
The middle rear seats of an aircraft had the lowest fatality rate: 28%, compared to 44% for the middle aisle seats, according to a TIME investigation that examined 35 years' worth of aircraft accident data.
“The smoothest place to sit is over the wings,” commercial pilot Patrick Smith, host of AskThePilot.com said. These seats are close to the plane's center of lift and gravity. “The roughest spot is usually the far aft. In the rearmost rows, closest to the tail, the knocking and swaying is more pronounced,” Smith added.
Improving safety over time
According to research by Harvard University, flying in the US, Europe, and Australia is actually significantly safer than driving a car. Your odds of being in an accident during a flight is one in 1.2 million, and the chances of that accident being fatal are one in 11 million.
What is the safest seat on an airplane? According to a TIME investigation from 2015 that examined 35 years of aircraft accident data, the middle seats at the back of the plane had the lowest fatality rate at 28%. The second-safest option is the aisle seats in the middle of the plane, at 44%.
Turbulence is a sudden and sometimes violent shift in airflow. Those irregular motions in the atmosphere create air currents that can cause passengers on an airplane to experience annoying bumps during a flight, or it can be severe enough to throw an airplane out of control. "(The pilots) aren't scared at all.
“Pilots use preflight weather briefings to detect turbulence along their route of flight. Once airborne, pilots will receive 'ride reports' from other aircrew who encountered rough air, so they have time to coordinate a path around the turbulence,” he explains.
While turbulence can feel scary, airplanes are designed to withstand massive amounts of it. "A plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket," wrote pilot Patrick Smith on his site, AskThePilot.com.