Can airplane fly if there is no air friction?

Question

No air friction means no drag.

Answer 1

An airplane will fly. In fact, when students first learn the lift equations, there is no friction term. If you assume that the fluid has no viscosity, infinitely thin, and has an infinitely long wing, then you would have an airplane that can fly without drag. In fact, when you first learn how to calculate the lift coefficient of an airfoil, we use these assumptions and they are quite good for calculating lift of a section of a wing.

There are three different components of drag. Skin friction, form drag, and induced drag.

Skin Friction:
What we mainly use is what's called the viscosity of air. This is a measure of how "thick and sticky" the gas is. For example, maple syrup is very viscous, helium gas is not. We use this and plug it into an equation that involves a coefficient and an integral. This coefficient is pretty much experimentally proven (it is a result of complex flow geometries near the surface of the wing). The integral is the integral of the area exposed to the fluid (air in this case).

What we end up with in measuring this is what's called the "skin friction drag". This only accounts for a small portion of the total drag acting on an aircraft.

Form Drag:
This is simply drag caused by the shape and size of the aircraft.

Induced Drag:
This is drag arising from the generation of lift.
Another component of drag (disregarding near supersonic and supersonic flow) is the drag created by the aircraft generating lift. When an aircraft generates lift at the wings, the pressure above the wing surface is lower than the pressure below due to multiple reasons. What happens from this is that the wings create vortices as the air from below "spills" over to the top of the wing. It's a little long to explain here, but this is where drag from lift is generated.

For more info:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/induced.html

Thus, what we see is drag is NOT needed to generate lift.

Answer 2

If you are talking about a physics question that assumes no losses to friction. You can still calculate the different forces present. Meaning you can still find out how much force is required to move the airplane, etc. etc. In real life, however, it is the movement of air over the wings that allows airplanes to fly. Lift is produced as high pressure air collects under the wings and low pressure air moves over the tops of the wings. But as this air moves over the surface of the wings and the rest of the plane drag is produced by friction. Mostly, this is compensated for by aircraft engineers by designing airplanes with low drag coefficients. Meaning pointy noses and no bulky stuff on the plane.

Answer 3

Airplane don,t fly because of air friction , rather the air friction tends to produce drag. So an airplane can surely fly without air friction

Answer 4

There is no component of lift that is dependent on friction; the coefficient of drag does depend on friction but also on lift. There are components of aerodynamic drag that do not depend on friction. At low speeds, friction is virtually nothing, like for paper airplanes. But it doesn't really matter since there's always friction in the real world.

Unless, of course, you're thinking of the Space Shuttle right now. It has wings, but cannot fly because thre's no air in space. So while it can manuever out there by jet propulsion, it cannot fly.

Answer 5

I would say that the airplane could not fly. I just graduated from college with an Agricultural Engineering degree, so please correct me if i am wrong. I would appreciate it. you can send me and email at [e-mail]. in order to build up pressure on the bottom side of the wing you would need friction. If you were doing calculations, you would assume a no slip condition. so without friction to create this condition you couldnt fly. You want to minimize your losses due to friction to make your airplane more efficient, but at the same time you do rely on it to make your airplane fly.

Answer 6

While it is true that the first equations used to calculate airfoil lift are frictionless, they are also incomplete. You have to assume that the air leaves the sharp trailing edge. This is called the Kutta condition. This condition is true in practice because viscosity of air (friction) prevents the air from circulating aroud the sharp trailing edge (which is perfectly acceptable solution of inviscid flow).

Therefore, the short answer to your question is that no, without air friction an airplane can not fly.

Answer 7

If there were no friction, the answer has to be NO. As soon as the aeroplane achieves some velocity there would be a vertical vector caused to the differential vector on the wings, providing lift. Unfortunately, as there is NO friction the vertical does not reduced by friction and the plane would rise uncontrollably.

Answer 8

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Answer 9

the aircraft will be more efficient in flight, using less fuel and going faster. flight is the result of the lift the wings create by forming low pressure on top of the wing and hi pressure under the wing. the hi pressure pushes the wing up.

Answer 10

Aeroplanes cant fly - its impossible as they are heavier than air - SILLY