The only groups of living things that use powered flight are birds, insects, and bats, while many groups have evolved gliding. By contrast, aerodynes primarily use aerodynamic lift, which requires the lateral movement of at least some part of the aircraft through the surrounding air mass.Īerodynamic flight Unpowered flight versus powered flight An aerostat's main structural component is its envelope, a lightweight skin that encloses a volume of lifting gas to provide buoyancy, to which other components are attached.Īerostats are so named because they use "aerostatic" lift, a buoyant force that does not require lateral movement through the surrounding air mass to effect a lifting force.
Aerostats include free balloons, airships, and moored balloons. Humans have managed to construct lighter-than-air vehicles that raise off the ground and fly, due to their buoyancy in air.Īn aerostat is a system that remains aloft primarily through the use of buoyancy to give an aircraft the same overall density as air. The engineering aspects of flight are the purview of aerospace engineering which is subdivided into aeronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through the atmosphere, and astronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through space, and ballistics, the study of the flight of projectiles.Īn airship flies because the upward force, from air displacement, is equal to or greater than the force of gravity Many things can fly, from animal aviators such as birds, bats and insects, to natural gliders/parachuters such as patagial animals, anemochorous seeds and ballistospores, to human inventions like aircraft ( airplanes, helicopters, airships, balloons, etc.) and rockets which may propel spacecraft and spaceplanes. This can be achieved by generating aerodynamic lift associated with gliding or propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement.
air flight or aviation) or through the vacuum of outer space (i.e. Human-invented flight: a Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 787įlight or flying is the process by which an object moves through a space without contacting any planetary surface, either within an atmosphere (i.e.
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