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Wing Spoilers - How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly by Boldmethod
Wing Spoilers - How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly by Boldmethod
Wing Spoilers - How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly by Boldmethod
Olivier CABARET
Spoiler alert: while most control surfaces increase lift, not all of them do. And we'll prove
it today with wing spoilers. Wing spoilers are actually pretty impressive, because they
can do more than one job. In fact, they can do three, and here they are:
Gliders use spoilers during approach and landing. By extending spoilers, glider pilots
can increase drag, lower the nose, and descend faster without significantly increasing
airspeed. Check out the spoilers extending out of the wing in the animation below:
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10/21/2015 Wing Spoilers: How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly | Boldmethod
droneviking
Airliners use spoilers to their advantage as well. If you need to descend quickly, spoilers
are often the answer to controlling your airspeed while you lose altitude. And if you're
flying through icing conditions, you often times can't reduce your engines to flight idle,
because you need to keep your antiicing surfaces, which are heated with engine bleed
air, hot. Again, spoilers increase drag enough for you to keep your engines producing
sufficient bleed air, making life a little bit easier.
Wikipedia
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10/21/2015 Wing Spoilers: How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly | Boldmethod
at work:
Jeffh737
There are a couple advantages to using spoilerons. First, when you have high speed
airflow over your wings, using ailerons can actually generate so much force that your
wings twist, causing your aircraft to bank in the opposite direction. And that's definitely
not good.
But there's another benefit to spoilerons: they reduce adverse yaw in a bank. In normal
aircraft, when you bank, the outboard aileron moves down, creating more lift, and more
drag. But, when you use spoilers to roll, they generate form drag on the inboard wing.
This helps keep your nose in line with the turn, which means you don't need to use as
much rudder to stay coordinated.
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10/21/2015 Wing Spoilers: How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly | Boldmethod
Jeffh737
When airliners touch down, they detect when the wheels hit the pavement, and they
deploy ground spoilers. The ground spoilers do two things: put the full aircraft's weight
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10/21/2015 Wing Spoilers: How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly | Boldmethod
on the wheels, and create form drag. And when they pop up, the airliner can stop in a
much shorter distance.
Vertical spoilers are typically used on smaller aircraft, like gliders. When vertical spoilers
are raised, they disrupt airflow over the aft part of the wing. But when they first start to
raise, they aren't very effective. The further they extend, the more effective they are,
which means they're good for dumping altitude and airspeed, but not so great for
controlling roll. They also have another limit: the thickness of the wing. Simply put, you
can't fit a tall vertical spoiler into a thin wing.
Hinged spoilers are much more common, and they're typically what you see on airliners.
They're more effective in small deflections, which makes control inputs more
responsive. And, you can hinge a big spoiler onto the wing of an airliner.
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10/21/2015 Wing Spoilers: How Destroying Lift Helps You Fly | Boldmethod
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