Quote:
Originally Posted by Spooky
Earth's gravity is "always" the dominant factor no matter how many G's an aircraft is capable of - hence the term "G-Force". When/if the aircraft can escape earth's gravitational pull, or just remains on the ground, is obviously when gravity is no longer a factor for flight. Interesting, for example, if we had communities on the moon the so called "aircraft", due to the lesser affects of gravity, would be designed so much differently than our earth bound aircraft, i.e.: the "Lunar Lander". If not for the heavy burden of US military defense, expensive wars, and less attention to our space program, we could, in reality, have had many "dome-like" communities on the moon, and the "Lunar Lander" (aerial moon-craft) would have had 50 years of development behind it. We are "infants" in relation to how advanced we could be with both earth bound aircraft and spacecraft. The Arrow and Avro Canada, no doubt, could have been a leader in our world's fighter aircraft and aerospace technologies...  |
Yes I imagine (I'm not an engineer, I'm a physicist) the strength of Earth's gravity is a hugely important factor in design for a number of reasons: for one, the design needs to be structurally sound on the ground and at low speeds, and of course it does need to overcome gravity before it can fly. But there are much stronger forces in play when up there and turning sharply at the speeds that modern jets do. One of the fundamental concepts of Einstein's theory of general relativity is the equivalence principle, and without going off on too much of a tangent it states that there is no difference between acceleration and the effects of gravity, and that is of course where we get the idea of a 'g' from - it is the acceleration of an abject due to the gravitational force between that object and the Earth. So when an aircraft experiences a force/acceleration of 9 g, that really is nine times more dominant than the Earth's gravity at that point.
Again I am no mechanical engineer, and I am sure the Earth's gravity is very important in design; but you can't tell me that there aren't more dominant forces that need to be considered, especially when you're dealing with aircraft that can pull something like 9 g.