Quotes About Aerodynamics

There is no medicine maybe for everything, but there is a big medicine which is downforce in an F1 car.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying. There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.

No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.

And from a poise at this station the plane may swoop down, at great disadvantage if close to the back of the wave, at various slopes and directions till it cuts into the air that is being raised by the face of the following wave, which again enables it to resume its velocity.

The plane is simply abstracting the power stored in the wave by a distant gale, and using it to counteract gravity. And if the work be continued long enough, or a multitude of planes be continually drawing on the reservoir of power, the wave must inevitably be flattened.

Nowadays you need a strong aero package, a good aerodynamic car, but also mechanically you cannot afford to have poor suspension. It all goes together as a package and you have to have harmony in the car.

If you have more downforce, everything becomes much easier. Drivers drive better, engineers they have more room for setup, the tyres are working better because you switch them on earlier and you have less degradation.

Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, towards beauty. Vogon ships did not nod towards beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their wait through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside.

In bobsled, you work as a team - a driver and a brakeman. Both athletes push, but the brakeman's biggest responsibility is to push as fast as she can and get in and ride down in a good aerodynamic position. The driver helps to push but gets in first and then steers the sled down the track. We aren't just along for the ride, despite how it looks!

According to classical aerodynamics, it is impossible for a bumblebee to fly.

A fellow undergraduate student, majoring in history, as was I, who didn't care about the advanced aerodynamic principles of things like boundary layer separation during stalls and exactly why you might get detonation within the cylinders of the engine if the mixture was grossly improperly adjusted for a given power setting at a given altitude.

A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset. No one could explain exactly why, but the phenomenon was easily observed in experiments. Something to do with multiple axes of spin, and wobble, and aerodynamics, and the general difference between theory and practice.

The lighter the car, the faster it goes.

Flight without feathers is not easy.

The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing.

The other sprinters are big and powerful but I have different strengths. The first thing is my leg speed. Most guys sprint at 120 revolutions per minute but I sprint at 130-140: think of it like a smaller engine revving faster. My body is shorter too, so I can lean over the handlebars for a more aerodynamic profile: again, think a smaller engine but in an F1 car.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.

I consider myself a 3-D philosopher. I am not a designer at all. I studied aerodynamics, I studied philosophy, I studied sculpture. High technology on one side, and on the other side, art.

I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that's not science, that's just a formula.

A commercial aircraft is a vehicle capable of supporting itself aerodynamically and economically at the same time.

When you're flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up or down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backward through the air: thrust and drag. Thrust is the power that pulls the kite forward—you run with it to get it up in the air. You have to have thrust to create lift. Drag is there because your kite's surfaces push against the air and slow the kite down. Drag doesn't pull you out of the sky; it makes you fly more slowly.

Driving at high speed where safe and legal is part of my life. As well as a higher top speed I wanted even better stability in my FX and that meant work on the aerodynamics.