What is wing loading

This means a stall could theoretically happen at any angle, speed, or power setting. Stall speed is determined by the airplane manufacturer based upon the wind and airplane design. Most commonly, a stall is caused by a pilot pulling up on the nose of the aircraft, without adding any power.

This causes the speed to decrease, the wings to generate less lift, and eventually, once the critical angle of attack is exceeded, the wings will stop generating lift altogether and the plane will begin falling out of the sky.

So how is this corrected? Assuming the aircraft is properly weighted something every good pilot ensures well before take-off , the pilot simply needs to decrease the angle of attack, usually, this means by pushing the nose back down. With smaller airplanes, power is generally given simultaneously to gather airspeed and once again generate lift with the wings. It is a process that has an almost infinite amount of aspects to be considered, but generally takes a total of about 10 seconds to occur.

Again, these can technically happen to any aircraft, however, it is incredibly rare in passenger airlines for a stall to happen without extenuation circumstances. The wing loading simply is a measurement that tells us the weight of the plane relative to the wing area. A higher wing loading means that the stall, takeoff, and landing speeds will become higher, while a lower wing loading allows the plane to operate at lower speeds.

Some airplanes that have a low wing loading including ultralight airplanes and gliders. On the other side of the spectrum, we have some of the denser military jets, as well as jumbo jets such as Boeing and Airbus Josh Lattuca is an FAA certified pilot for fixed-wing aircraft.

He has been around aviation for several years as both an airplane pilot and a crewman on helicopters. The wing loading characteristics of any aircraft are design features which dictate overall performance in several areas including lift capabilities, landing and take-off speeds, and maneuverability.

Generally in slower commercial designs, the larger the aircraft's wings are in relation to its weight, the better it will perform overall. In high speed designs however, the opposite is true, with smaller wings and higher wing loadings giving superior performance. Some flexibility is necessary in high speed designs, however, because they also operate at lower speeds and necessitate multipurpose wing designs such as variable sweep and blended fuselage types.

One of the most critical areas of aerodynamic design is the wing loading factor of any given aircraft. Read this article on stalls and how they work. A small wing has less area on which the wind can push whereas a larger wing has more.

Most foam board planes can be built with low wing loadings meaning they only stall at very low airspeeds - which is nice! So how do you work out the wing loading of a particular model aircraft? So how do we put this information about wing loading into practice? Well, as Josh Bixler says, you have to start by thinking about the experience you want. This plane below is small and relatively heavy. This means it has to be flown fairly fast. This aircraft below is very lightweight and has a lot of lift from undercambered wings.

Make sure you've listened to this podcast with Josh Bixler which explains how he goes about designing planes with aerodynamics in mind. If an elephant which has a large heart and strong muscles had wings, could it fly? A bat has wings and can fly — for every gram of the bat, there is 5 cm 2 of wing area.

If you apply this to an elephant of mass kg, you need a wing area of m 2 , which is more than the total area of 6 tennis courts! Even if the elephant had enormous wings, they would have to be supported by strong bones, and the weight of these would increase the wing loading. They would also need strong muscles to move the wings, which would also add to the wing loading. Planes are heavy like the elephant , but they can move very fast, showing that the ability to fly depends not only on wing size but also on the speed at which the wings move through the air.

A plane will leave the runway because the speed at which it travels for example, kph for an Airbus A allows the wings to develop lift great enough to raise the heavy machine into the air.

The faster a plane or bird flies, the more lift is produced by each unit area of wing. So planes and birds with smaller wings can carry the same heavy load as larger winged planes and birds if they travel faster. How do birds fly? Birds have many features, besides wings, that work together to enable them to fly.