Tell me about aircraft?

Question

Tell me about aircraft?

Answer 1

Read about it first, then ask what you don't understand, as the whole Q&A  or what one studied for 2 or 4 years cannot just be explain here in two or three sentences.

Answer 2

an aircraft consists of 3 essentials.1,airframe to accomodate     cockpit,passenger/cargo section and fuselage.2proppeler or     turbojet engines to power the aircraft to fly and thirdly avionics    to lift or dip and turn righr or left plus the instrumentation

Answer 3

An aircraft is a vehicle which is able to fly through the Earth's atmosphere or through any other atmosphere. Most rocket vehicles are not aircraft because they are not supported by the surrounding air. All the human activity which surrounds aircraft is called aviation.

Manned aircraft are flown by a pilot. Until the 1960s, unmanned aircraft were called drones. During the 1960s, the U.S. military brought the term remotely piloted vehicle (RPV) into use. More recently the term unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become common

Kinds of aircraft

Aircraft fall into two categories: lighter-than-air (aerostats), and heavier-than-air (aerodynes).

[edit] Lighter than air—aerostats



A hot air balloon in flight.Aerostats use buoyancy to float in the air in much the same way that ships float on the water. They are characterized by one or more large gasbags or canopies, filled with a relatively low density gas such as helium, hydrogen or hot air, which is lighter than the surrounding air. When the weight of this is added to the weight of the aircraft structure, it adds up to the same weight as the air that the craft displaces.

Small hot air balloons called sky lanterns date back to the 3rd century BC and were only the second type of aircraft to fly, the first being kites.

Originally a "balloon" was any aerostat, while the term "airship" was used for large powered aircraft designs—usually fixed-wing—though none had yet been built. The advent of powered balloons, called dirigible balloons, and later of rigid hulls allowing a great increase in size, began to change the way these words were used. Huge powered aerostats, characterized by a rigid outer framework and separate aerodynamic skin surrounding the gas bags, were produced, the Zeppelins being the largest and most famous. There were still no aeroplanes or non-rigid balloons large enough to be called airships, so "airship" came to be synonymous with these monsters. Then several accidents, such as the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, led to the demise of these airships. Nowadays a balloon is an unpowered aerostat, whilst an airship is a powered one.

A powered, steerable aerostat is called a dirigible. Sometimes this term is applied only to non-rigid balloons, and sometimes dirigible balloon is regarded as the definition of an airship (which may then be rigid or non-rigid). Non-rigid dirigibles are characterized by a moderately aerodynamic gasbag with stabilizing fins at the back. These soon became known as blimps. During the Second World War, this shape was widely adopted for tethered balloons; in windy weather this both reduces the strain on the tether and stabilizes the balloon. The nickname blimp was adopted along with the shape. In modern times any small dirigible or airship is called a blimp, though a blimp may be unpowered as well as powered.

[edit] Heavier than air—aerodynes

Heavier-than-air aircraft must find some way to push air or gas downwards, so that a reaction occurs (by Newton's laws of motion) to push the aircraft upwards. This dynamic movement through the air is the origin of the term aerodyne. There are two ways to produce dynamic upthrust: aerodynamic lift, and powered lift in the form of engine thrust.

Aerodynamic lift is the most common, with aeroplanes kept in the air by the forward movement of wings, and rotorcraft by spinning wing-shaped rotors sometimes called rotary wings. A flexible wing is a wing made of fabric or thin sheet material, often stretched over a rigid frame. A kite is tethered to the ground and relies on the speed of the wind over its wings, and its wings may be flexible or rigid, fixed or rotary. A wing is a flat, horizontal surface, usually shaped in cross-section as an aerofoil. To fly, the wing must move forwards through the air; this movement of air over the aerofoil shape deflects air downward to create an equal and opposite upward force, called lift, according to Newton's third law of motion.

With powered lift, the aircraft directs its engine thrust vertically downwards.

The initialism VTOL (vertical take off and landing) is applied to aircraft that can take off and land vertically. Most are rotorcraft. Others, such as the Hawker Siddeley Harrier, take off and land vertically using powered lift and transfer to aerodynamic lift in steady flight. STOL stands for short take off and landing.

A pure rocket is not usually regarded as an aerodyne, because it does not depend on the air for its lift (and can even fly into space), however many aerodynamic lift vehicles have been powered or assisted by rocket motors. Rocket-powered missiles which obtain aerodynamic lift at very high speed due to airflow over their bodies, are a marginal case.

[edit] Fixed-wing aircraft



A size comparison of some of the largest aircraft. The Airbus A380-800 (largest airliner), the Boeing 747-8, the Antonov An-225 (aircraft with the greatest payload) and the Hughes H-4 "Spruce Goose" (aircraft with greatest wingspan).Aeroplanes or airplanes are technically called fixed-wing aircraft.

The forerunner of the aeroplane is the kite. A kite depends upon the tension between the cord which anchors it to the ground and the force of the wind currents. Kites were the first kind of aircraft to fly, and were invented in China around 500 BC. Much aerodynamic research was done with kites before test aircraft, wind tunnels and computer modelling programs became available.



NASA test aircraftAeroplanes are generally characterized by their wing configuration.

In a conventional configuration, the main wings are placed in front of a smaller stabilizer surface or tailplane. The canard reverses this, placing a small foreplane stabilizer forward of the wings, near the nose of the aircraft. Canards are becoming more common as supersonic aerodynamics grows more mature and because the forward surface contributes lift during straight-and-level flight. The tandem wing type has two wings of similar size, one at the front and one at the back. In a tailless design, the lift and horizontal control surfaces are combined. The ultimate expression of this is the flying wing, where there is no central fuselage, and perhaps even no separate vertical control surface (e.g., the B-2 Spirit).

Sometimes two or more wings are stacked one above the other. A biplane has two wings and a triplane three, while quadruplanes (four) and above have been tried but have never been successful. Up until the 1930s, biplanes were the most common. Triplanes were only occasionally made, especially for a brief period during the First World War due to their high manoeuvrability as fighters. Since the Second World War, most aeroplanes have been monoplanes. A sesquiplane is similar to a biplane, but with the lower wing much reduced in size. A monoplane has only one wing. Monoplanes are further classified as high-wing, mid-wing or low-wing according to where on the fuselage the wing is attached, or parasol wing if the wing passes above the fuselage.

Most multi-plane designs are braced, with struts and/or wires holding the wings in place. Some monoplanes, especially early designs, are also braced, because this allows a much lighter weight than a clean, unbraced cantilever design. But bracing causes a large amount of drag at higher speeds, so it has not been used for faster designs since the 1930s.

Most low-speed aeroplanes have a straight wing, which may be constant-chord, or tapered so that it decreases in chord towards the tip. For flight near or above the speed of sound, a swept wing is usually used, where the wing angles backwards towards the tips. A notable variation is the delta wing, which is shaped like a triangle: the leading edge is sharply swept, but the trailing edge is straight; one common form is the cropped delta, which merges into the tapered swept category, and an especially graceful form is the double-curved ogival delta found for example on Concorde. Another variation is the crescent wing, seen for example on the Handley Page Victor, which is sharply swept inboard, with reduced sweep for the outboard section. A variable-geometry wing, or swing-wing, can change the angle of sweep in flight. It has been employed in a few examples of combat aircraft, the first production type being the General Dynamics F-111. An feature on some swept wings is a leading-edge root extension (LERX) at the wing root, which if greatly extended forward becomes a chine, as seen in the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Other planforms have been experimented with, including reverse taper, forward sweep, M-wing and W-wing which reverse sweep half way along, annular and circular.



Seaplane: Be-8 was built in 1947Seaplanes and Floatplanes differ in that a seaplane has the bottom of its fuselage shaped hydrodynamically and it sits directly on the water when at rest, while a floatplane has two or more floats attached below the rest of the aircraft so that the fuselage remains clear of the water at all times.

Some people consider wing-in-ground-effect vehicles to be aeroplanes, others do not. These craft "fly" close to the surface of the ground or water. An example is the Russian ekranoplan also nicknamed the "Caspian Sea Monster". Man-powered aircraft also rely on ground effect to remain airborne, but this is only because they are so underpowered - the airframe is theoretically capable of flying much higher. (Hovercraft are not considered to be aircraft, since they rely wholly on the pressure of air on the ground beneath, and have no aerodynamic lifting surface).

[edit] Rotorcraft



Bell 206B JetRanger III helicopterRotorcraft, or rotary-wing aircraft, use a spinning rotor with aerofoil section blades (a rotary wing) to provide lift. Types include helicopters, autogyros and various hybrids such as gyrodynes and compound rotorcraft.

Helicopters have powered rotors. The rotor is driven (

Answer 4

its very complex science, you'll need time to learn, just visit fallowing NASA site to know everything:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplan...