Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Why is the tail so important that the plane crashes when it ripped off in the sky?

Well I knew that wing is the part that forms the Bernoulli Principles which created lifts and fly the plane. But in most cases, when the tail is ripped off either by mechanical problem or accident, the plane immediately rolls and crash.





Why doesn't the wings helped to stabilize and continue flying the plane to a safety?|||First of all, the airplane has a relatively narrow band called the Center of Gravity (CG) limits. If the tail, or any other significant piece of metal falls off, then the CG has changed. Sort of like a teeter totter with a 200 lb guy on one end, and a 30 lb child along with a 170 lb guy on the other. What would happen if the 170 lb guy jumped off? Add to that the fact that the piece that fell off was the piece that could apply control inputs to offset the sudden CG change, and you can see that the situation is immediately hopeless.





Dutch Roll: When a swept wing airplane is yawed even slightly, the advancing wing produces slightly more lift as it is straighter into the wind, but also slightly more drag. This causes the wing to raise slightly, and then immediately, because of the additional drag, it starts to retreat causing yaw in the opposite direction. This is normally not a problem. Between the vertical stabilizer, and rudder at low altitudes, and yaw damper at high altitudes, this is not a problem. Without these control surfaces, the oscillations will continue to increase until the airplane rolls out of control.





Imagine that you are driving down the road in your perfectly aligned auto, and some evil magician vaporizes your steering wheel and brake pedal. How long do you think it would be before your car was completely out of control?





If the controls are frozen or otherwise inoperative, then we have some strategies to try to deal with that. These strategies may or may not work. However, without the tail feathers, all hope is immediately lost. The gyrations would be so violent that I'm not at all certain the anyone would be fully conscious when the airplane hit the ground.|||Without the tail there is still some control left to the pilots. The pilots can control yaw as well as altitude by varying power and directional control maintained with elevator inputs. This is more easy or difficult depending on the type of plane. However several crashes have been caused by problems in the tail including structural failures such as you described but the crashes were more a result of the catastrophic events that causes the tail section to fail. Examples include Japan airlines flight 123 and United airlines flight 232. However American Airlines flight 587 is an example where a failure limited to the tail section caused the aircraft to crash. The phase of flight (take off) as well as poor pilot inputs were the main factors that resulted in this being a non survivable incident|||The three basic aircraft motions are Pitch, Yaw, and Roll.


In modern aircraft (fighters using unstable platform) the Fly By Wire system constantly adjust the tail section stabilizers(completely automatic and uninformed) to stay in pilot mentioned level.





The Elevator in the Horizontal stabilizer of tail section provide pitch... Unlike big passenger or cargo aircraft the fighter planes uses the entire horizontal stabilizer as Elevator(whole stabilizer is movable. Up and Down).





The horizontal rotation of the whole aircraft body in its axis and plane is known as YAW. Rudder(Left and Right Movement) in the Vertical stabilizer of Tail section provide yaw. The new Sukhoi T50 PAK FA uses the whole vertical stabilizer as rudder(whole stabilizer is movable).


Also modern fighters and combat aircraft using tail section with the ailerons on each wing to Roll the aircraft.|||Aerodynamics of flight consists of control for pitch, yaw and roll. The rear stabilizer enables control of yaw and pitch.





Ahh! I see we now have Edit back.





As I was saying, the wings have ailerons which control roll and prevent the aircraft from rolling left or right (unless you want it to).





However, without the tail section, you cannot control the direction in which the nose points.





The rear horizontal stabilizers control the up or down direction of the nose and therefore of the aircraft. This is pitch control.





The tail fin has the rudder which controls yaw - the left or right directional control of the nose and aircraft.





Without the tail section, you have virtually no pitch or yaw control.|||The tail provides all of the control...wings just lift they don't have anyway of moving to adjust course.

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