Gauging Interest - Math for Pilots
- Thread starter ppragman
- Start date
killbilly
Vocals, Lyrics, Triangle, Washboard, Kittens
WacoFan
Bigly
This is an excellent idea Pat and I would encourage you to do this. Also, you might like the book "Innumeracy". Learning more math will help beyond the cockpit. My daughter, an applied mathematics/actuarial science major thinks lack of even moderate math skill/knowledge is the greatest tragedy and why we have such foolish people running everything in DC. The more math you know, the greater BS detector you are.
Definitely interested. I don't see a need to go beyond algebra though, but knock yourself out. Trig would be nice, but folks hear words like calculus and trigonometry and suddenly they are feel they are reading a Korean soap opera script.
Let me know if I can help. I'd be willing to bet Tgray would be happy to collaborate. He can keep us both from being full of crap!
Lack of truly understanding the lift and climb formulas intimately has killed millions. Less than 10 total variables that can be manipulated a handful of ways. Too much work, it has single letters with those weird symbols and more letters and I'm not an engineer.....
I wonder how much math the average aerobatic, military fighter pilot, bush pilot, or otherwise knew. Originally pilots understood their machines, but ever since we threw a steering wheel in there and advertised it was just like a car people don't even bother checking the oil before taking their machine flying. Now engineers sit in the labs and try and put enough safety devices into that the pilots that learned to fly on the back of this advertisement are incapable of killing anyone.
We still figure out ways to crash these machines that would run out of gas flying (Someone link MikeD's 152 hand prop accident?) without us in them though don't we? And, by enlarge, pilots still argue that understanding how it works is pointless.
z987k
Well-Known Member
I'm not sure that I agree that pilots ever understood their machines. At least from a truly mathematical point of view.
An interesting fact about aviation is that the mathematics behind flight was known many decades before the Wright brothers ever achieved it. Now they certainly didn't know all of that math, but they knew how to logically analyse their machine and I'm confident they understood gliding versus powered flight. They obviously understood the rudder, I mean they did invent it or something like that; right?
My point is not that pilots should understand the analytics to a point of being able to build a flying machine like the early aviators did. However, we could stand to learn a thing or two from a few simple algebraic relationships. Namely those on Lift, Drag, Power vs. Thrust, and Weight.
Yes, Weight; because:
Weight = Mass x Gravity.
Gravity varies with a pilots fore and aft inputs. By the way, that's all a pilot needs to know about weight: Weight is controlled by a pilot through pulling or pushing on the stick/yoke. This is because the stick changes Gravity and Gravity and Weight are directly proportional. Meaning, if Gravity increases, from pulling back on the controls then theoretical weight increased. (I say theoretical because actual weight is based on mass and will remain constant regardless of pilot input.)
Similar explanations (combined with some demonstrations) can shed light on each physical component of flight and how the pilot can manipulate it safely.
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