• Question: How does the airplane not stall on the nose-up part of the parabolic flights?

    Asked by Anon on 2 Jan 2016.
    • Photo: Steve Price

      Steve Price answered on 2 Jan 2016:

      Hi,
      Aerodynamic lift is caused by an object moving through a fluid, in this case air. It is the movement of an object through the air. The speed of the air comes from the direction of flight. If the engines are powerful enough, they will push the plane through the air. Although the plane looks nose up to us on the ground, the air is flowing from nose to tail and therefore the angle of attack is small.
      The simple answer is that the engines are so powerful it is pushing the plane the air.

    • Photo: Jean-François Clervoy

      Jean-François Clervoy answered on 18 Jan 2016:

      Hello,

      That is because stall is not dependent on the angle between the aircraft and the horizon but on the angle between the aircraft and the airflow direction (called angle of attack). During the parabolic manoeuvre, this angle remains very small (few degrees) compared to the nose-up angle over the horizon (around 55 degrees max). When the aircraft is pointing up to the sky, it doesn’t move horizontally, but climbs very fast in the direction of the nose.

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