A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
As stated it Sir Cayley to maintain a plane in flight, three elements must be assured: the lift of the plane, its propulsion and finally its stability. Two of these forces are generated by the relative movement of the air compared to the plane. The first one is the lift. This force is directed upwards and is acting perpendicular to the displacement of the plane. It is thanks to this force that the plane is maintained in the air. The second is the drag. It is exerted in the direction opposed to the displacement of the plane. It is due to the breaking action of the air on the plane and is opposed to the advance of the plane. The lift and the drag are called aerodynamic forces because they are resulting from the action of the air due to the displacement of the airplane. The force due to gravity, the weight of the plane, is opposed to the lift. The balance of the lift and the weight leads to the fact that the plane is maintained at constant altitude. To e...