The Sopwith Camel was a British biplane in use during WWI. (It is also the plane Snoopy flies in!) Explain why this plane was very difficult to take off and land in using the physics principals of torque and explaining how a rotary engine worked. How did pilots have to handle the plane to make it fly straight when taking off?
The Sopwith Camel was a British biplane in use during WWI. (It is also the plane Snoopy flies in!) Explain why this plane was very difficult to take off and land in using the physics principals of torque and explaining how a rotary engine worked. How did pilots have to handle the plane to make it fly straight when taking off?
The Sopwith Camel was difficult to handle due to the extreme effect of Gyroscopic effect due to the absence of tail .
The rotary engine controls the movement of the plane , where the speed of the plane is entirely controlled by using the blip switch by cutting the engine.
The Gyroscopic effect mainly works on the two main principles that is angular momentum and torque . Angular momentum is given as the product of moment of inertia and angular velocity while torque is the cross product of radius and the force acting , thus torque acts perpendicular to the applied force and the radius.
The direction of angular momentum is determined by the right hand rule where the curled fingers is in the direction of rotation and the thumb will give the direction of angular momentum , thus it will be the direction of the torque as the force direction is in the direction of rotation. But a force is applied to change the axis of rotation, a torque will act on the perpendicular direction of force , this will change the angular momentum in both magnitude and direction. In order compensate this change the whole system will rotate, which is known as the Gyroscopic effect.
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