Discovery. Understanding Flight. Part 3.

Every year
the Birdman Rally brings that magic moment to Japan
where teams make their own innovative gliders
and compete for the longest glide
But gliding still isn't enough
We continue to be obsessed with muscle-powered flight
About twenty years ago
Paul MacCready designed a human-powered plane
the Gossamer Albatross
Powered only by the pilot's peddling
the Albatross flew
twenty-two miles across the English Channel
Well everybody, somehow
wishes they could do human-powered flight
It's a instinct that maybe all humans
share one way or another
The energy needed to drive the propeller
and move the Albatross forward
was almost more than the pilot could manage
And despite his physical conditioning
he barely made it
The problem is humans just aren't strong enough
But when you look at all the numbers
it turns out that to have a plane that is safe enough
ss... stable, uh, structurally sound enough to hold a person
ah, to keep a person aloft to be able to climb a bit
it takes about a minimum of three horsepower
And that's a factor of
ten more than a person can put out
Hoo, hoo, hoo! Whoo!
So we've come to rely on machines
to give us the power to thrust ourselves forward
The rubber band on a toy plane acts as an engine does
providing the energy to move the propellers
Propellers are like a spinning wing
Like a wing they produce lift but in a forward direction
Propellers are airfoils
when they bite into the air
and it creates lift and it thrust
just by the movement going through the air
It's just a big windmill basically
So now
if we take a piece of air here and we push it aft
it takes a force to do that
And that's's the force that's thrust
Propellers and piston engines have been pushing
and pulling planes across the sky for ninety years
Well, I can remember one day uh, looking up
and know, uh, that probably the same airplane route
that a propeller plane was on was now a jet
And that was captivating that as a child
I was watching technology change in front of my eyes
So to fly higher and faster we stopped soaring
like the swallows and started squirting like the squid
Creatures like octopus squid and jellyfish
all work on the same
principle as a jet engine action and reaction
So the fuel goes into the engine
It's converted into work by speeding up the air
increasing its energy as it goes out the back
And that difference then provides a thrust
John Travolta's Gulfstream II has two Rolls Royce jet engines
each producing almost twelve thousand pounds of thrust
This is an over-powered aircraft
A plane thirty thousand pounds heavier than this plane
is run by the same engines
The British aircraft ah, 111 which is an airliner
So you have that level of ah, of excess of power
I like overpowered airplanes... Three thousand
They thrill me... because in an emergency
you have more than you need
And, um, it gives you a sense of
of well-being on a certain level
For some pilots
it's more than a sense of well-being
Its speed is life
The faster... that you end up going
it's, ah, there's a lot of things it does for you
One, it gets you through a threat area quicker
And two, it's gonna
it doesn't allow missiles to track you
Roger that
If somebody's shooting at you
you try to go a little bit faster
Ah, or if you're trying to catch somebody
you try to go a little bit faster
And the afterburner
is simply a way... to get a, a short dash
what they call dash speed so that you can get into