Why don't the wings break?!

hi every very welcome to mentor another video podcast as always I hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video guys we're gonna be talking about wings and specifically why are they flexing as much as they do how much can they actually flex how are they constructed and is there anything that could make them break stay tuned this video is brought to you in cooperation with skill share now skill share is an online learning community with thousands of high-quality courses in pretty much anything yes anything that you can think about the first 500 of you guys who uses this link here below will get two months absolutely for free and I do really really recommend the do green and check some of the courses on right guys so today we're gonna be talking about wings and you've probably seen this yourself if you've been sitting by a window seat on an aircraft and you've been looking out to the wing and you've been looking at the wing especially if there's little bit of turbulence you would probably seen that the wings are kind of flexing up and down and I know that this is something that makes a lot of passengers nervous especially if you are a little bit afraid of flying to start with or you're a little bit of a nervous flier so today I'm gonna be explaining what it is that you're actually seeing now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about how the wings are constructed now as you probably know by now the wings are the part of the aircraft that is creating the lift to hold the aircraft up in the air so this means that the entire weight of the aircraft needs to be able to be held by the wings and in the case of a Boeing 747 or an Airbus 380 that's going to be hundreds of tons and only that it's hundreds of thumbs on top of the fact that it will actually be subjected to g-forces as well so it's actually more than the weight of the aircraft that the wings have to be holding so this will lead you to believe that the wings are extremely sturdy they're extremely well-built okay the wings and the wing box which is the connecting point of the wing under the aircraft is probably the most sturdy part of the entire aircraft okay the way that they are constructed is that you tend to have two parallel wing spars these are the bulks that are going from the wing tip all the way across the length of the wing into where they're connecting to the aircraft so the two of those generally could be more and between those spars you have what's called ribs these are elements that goes and shapes the wing that actually forms the shape of the wing and that connects the skin of the wing to the to the spars so the forces the aerodynamic forces of the of the wing is getting taken up by the skin which tends to be made of aluminium I'll get to that in a second and then it's transferred through the ribs onto the spars this construction where all of these parts are kind of sharing the loads slightly is extremely durable and not only that it's also very lightweight which is crucial when you're constructing an aircraft so I mentioned before that it's made out of aluminium but when you hear aluminum I bet that you think about you know aluminium cans like a coca-cola can or something like that but this is something completely different it is aluminium but it's an aluminium alloy which is extremely hard and durable it's called aviation grade aluminium the other benefit that you'll have by using that construction with spars and ribs is that a large portion of the wing is going to be empty so this means that we can put fuel inside of the wing now I've already done an episode about why we put fuel in the wings you can check it out here it's really really informative Oh guys I'd really want you to check that out but one of the reasons that we put fuel in the wings is because it acts as a counterweight to the rest of the weight inside of the aircraft that way if you put fuel tanks in the wings it means that instead of having all of the weight concentrated in the middle where the aircraft's sorry with the wings meet the aircraft now this is a fuel is out there the the weight is going to be more evenly distributed and that will actually help the wings from bending too much from flexing too much okay cool so I mentioned before that the wings are connected to the aircraft where our wing box now the wing box is situated just in front of the main wheel well Bay and it is pretty much a elongation of the wings so you have sports inside of there as well and you have something similar to ribs it is once again very very sturdy it is the part of the aircraft which is best built so it's connected the wings are connected to the wing box by are hundreds of bolts and it's the way that it is connected and interconnected into each other makes it pretty much whole piece so when you think about the wings connected to the aircraft you should be thinking the other way around it's actually the aircraft that is connected to the wings not the other way around that's how to think about it so what about the flexing them well the flexing of the wing when you look out if you're a little bit nervous and you look out and you see the wings or flexing like that what you should be thinking is this is a healthy construction because what you're seeing is the loads of the wing being shared by all the individual components so when a wing is flexing it means that there is not a single point that is being subjected to all of the forces but the forces are being equally distributed out of the wings so if the wings would be completely stiff okay if they wouldn't have any flex in them it means that all of the forces are being subjected onto the wings will be concentrated to a few points and that might be for example the points where the wings are connected to the wing box or something else and it's much more likely if you have something like that that those parts will be subjected to metal fatigue and that's where the wing is going to break so next time that you look out of the wing and you see it's flexing you should be thinking ah it's working that's the way it supposed to look the wings were reflecting different amount okay you are most likely to see a lot of wing flexing during takeoff because that's when the aircraft is heaviest that's when we have the most fuel on board and that's also when we're taking out the most amount of lift so as we are pulling back during the takeoff all of the lift needed to lift the aircraft off the ground is going to be subjected to the wings and you might see them kind of Bend upwards it's very very common to see it's in an almost extreme amount on like the boeing 787 dreamliner or the Airbus 350 and you will also see it flexing during turbulence so this leads us to ask what kind of limits do we have there are different limits of different types of aircraft but air transport can the aircraft's like the 737 or the Airbus 320 they are they have GE limits that range from minus 1 G 2 plus 2 and 1/2 G ok that's where we should be keeping if we're under normal circumstances as we're turning or if we are subjected to up to moderate turbulence but the aircraft manufacturers when they actually built the aircraft they will subject the wings and structure to much much more stress than that so there are huge security margins built into it now I should be mentioning as well when I'm talking about g-forces what g-forces actually are if you're sitting like I am now sitting in the sofa you are subjecting 1g onto the sofa your weight is 1g so minus 1g if I was subjected to minus 1g even mean that I would fly up into the roof okay that's the feeling you have you know when you have when you're in turbulence and you feel that kind of falling feeling with the stomach is coming up that is slight minus G but I can promise you that you've never felt minus 1g because that's a lot close two and a half G's that means two and a half times your body weight being pressed down so that's quite a lot that is more than you will be subjected to during rollercoasters for example normally M so wing flexing completely normal and it's due to to these things that are talking about D the differences you might see between different aircraft types is that like for example the 787 and the Airbus 350 they have made their wings not from aluminium but from composite materials and the composite materials are actually more flexible than aluminum is so those newer types aircraft you will see those wings flex way more then you will see on a water type of wings also you have to take into consideration the wing span if you are flying on a huge factor of like seven for Boeing 747 or an Airbus 380 well of course there's going to be much more components in those wings each component bends a little bit or flexes a little bit which means that a huge wingspan will look like if you look out to the wingtip like it's flexing more so that that would be considered completely normal as well now other things that the wing bending actually does is it acts a little bit like a damper so if you're flying on on one of these bigger aircraft it's likely that you will feel turbulence a little bit less that is both because of the damping force from the wing but also because of the just bigger mass in those aircrafts so what about what actually can cause an aircraft to break up what can actually break the wings well when we talk about this there are you know circumstances in nature that could cause this and that would be for example if we would fly our aircraft into a severe thunderstorm so inside of a thunderstorms there will be a lot of different air pillars going either up or down there's gonna be a lot of extreme turbulence and if we would find ourselves inside one of those thunderstorms like the ones that makes up the Hurricanes in America we could theoretically put the aircraft under more stress than it's designed to take and that could potentially create breaks in structure but I'm gonna say this again it is not the wings you're going to see breaking there's gonna be something else way before the wings break because they are extremely strong but we have weather radar to make sure that that doesn't happen we plan our flight so it doesn't happen we can see it outside of the window so flying into those types of extreme thunderstorms without noticing it it's very rare it almost never happens okay know the real challenge to the aircraft structure the real thing that could make an aircraft actually break up in mid-flight is poor maintenance that is really the only thing that we should be nervous about poor maintenance and what I mean by that is that the aircraft manufacturer have been given very clear maintenance schedules for each aircraft the way this is done is that as an aircraft is being constructed the aircraft manufacturer will subject all of the components or especially things like the wings to testing they would both physically test the wings by subjecting them to simulated cycles as in simulated takeoffs and landings but on top of that they will also put it into the computer so the engineers will know exactly what kind of metals are involved what kind of components are involved they have a computer model and then they start running that computer model just as if the aircraft was flying thousands of sectors and they run the computer model until they start seeing where and which component is most likely to break so let's say for example that they find that after 15,000 cycles there's one component that starts to show signs of metal fatigue well in that case they will go out and it would tell the people who are buying the aircraft the airline's that okay at 10050 sectors or 10,000 cycles we need you to go in and we need you to do either non-destructive testing non-destructive testing is x-rays or ultrasounds of these parts looking or see if there's anything wrong with them or most likely they're just going to tell them to replace this individual component it's not gonna be the whole wing but it's gonna be a part of it that might be either reinforced or replaced so this has been done throughout the life of an aircraft you do checks on a very regular intervals and on fairly regular intervals you have these larger checks would you actually have to go in an x-ray and check all of the different components that might be subject to metal fatigue you also have something called the fleet leader and that's the first aircraft that has been brought into service of a specific type that fleet leader is being subjected to extra checks because it's going to be kind of the the mother ship the one that you can see all right so here is how it's actually working outside of the computer in the real world how it is actually progressing and if it finds if the if the Boeing for example find something with one of the fleet leaders well then that is going to go out to all of the different airlines that have bought the specific type and say okay check for this this is why you see for example when something does happen that immediately there is a message sent out to everyone who's operating that particular type to make sure that this component is working properly so this means that all the airlines that are not following these guidance from the manufacturer are the ones that stand a risk to you know fatigue metal fatigue their aircrafts where you might actually get into a catastrophic failure and the obvious question of that would be well how do I avoid flying with airlines like that that this is actually very very simple what you do is you fly on any airline that is allowed to fly for example in the European Union or in the United States because the way that this is checked is that the civil aviation authorities are obviously making sure and doing inspections on all airlines to make sure that they're following all the different maintenance steps if an airline is found not to follow the maintenance steps and not to have the proper security and safety measures in force well then they would put be put on something called the blacklist and the different CAS have these black lists so some airlines might not be allowed to enter the airspace so for example Europe or US and of course an airline who is not allowed to enter that and that is an airline that you should be careful with but any other airline that is allowed to fly within these air spaces you can be absolutely sure that they are being checked and held to the absolute highest standard so there's no point of being worried about them guys if you have more questions about this if you have more questions about how an air craft is constructed or why it looks a specific way then please put in a comment here below and also if you want to ask me directly right now for example then you just get my free up man Travie ation there are links to it down here and you're going to the chat and you put at mentor what is this and I will get a message onto my phone and I can talk to you directly there's also videos in there that I think that you should be watching you know different YouTube videos that I recommend and things like that and also courses on how to set up the 737 from dark until it's ready to taxi or how to do a rejected takeoff in an evacuation so check that out before we go I want to send a special thank you to Skillshare who made this video possible Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of high quality courses and pretty much anything that you can imagine the way that I use Skillshare myself is I green if there's something that I want to improve on or I want to learn for example if I want to learn how to paint I love painting and/or improve my Spanish skills or indeed how to start a YouTube channel well I just going to Skillshare a login I write in what it is that I'm looking for and voila there will be like 10 or 15 different courses from really good instructors and believe me I know when I see a good instructor and they will teach me in a very pedagogical way how to improve on whatever skill it is that I want to improve so the 501st of you guys who uses this link here below will get to month of the premium feature of Skillshare absolutely for free so there's no risk involved just go in and check it out have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye bye [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,589,492

Keywords: Pilot, Mentour Pilot, How to become a pilot, Pilot Youtuber, Flying, Fear of flying, Fear of flight, Wing, Wing Flexing, Wing Bending, Boeing 747, Boeing 787, Dreamliner, Cool takeoff, Airbus 380, Airbus 350 takeoff, Airbus 350, Boeing 737, Boeing 737NG, Boeing 737MAX, Mentor, Motivation, Flight training, Flight school, Landing, Takeoff, Avgeek, Avnerd, Aviation facts, How planes are made, Spar, Wingbox, Fuel, Fuel hoax, Captain, Mentour

Id: Tu6k_-O8FGU

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018