Every travel pic that you see on your friends' Snapchat is of a plane wing, but what do you
really know about those mechanical marvels?
And what is that little flippy thing?
Hey wingbats, Trace here for DNews.
A Boeing 787 has over 2.3 million parts, and workers on the 747 have to drill 1,000,000
holes during its assembly.
AIRPLANES ARE COMPLICATED.
Aircraft companies are constantly working to update how they design and build these
massive machines.
They have to fly for decades, take off and land constantly (a 737 takes off somewhere
on Earth every 2 seconds) and of course, be smooth and comfy; that's important too.
For me though, when I see an airplane I see an aerodynamic tube with wings hooked on the
bottom.
Simple.
But, in reality…
We put a lot of time and energy into make sure the wing body goes on correctly and that
there are zero defects.
That's Kay Keovongphet.
She is a supervisor at the Boeing 737 manufacturing factory in Renton, Washington.
It's approximately a 12 hour process ] The wing body joint is the heartbeat of
the final assembly and if the wings don't get attached, the airplane doesn't move to
the next flow day.
This factory builds 42 airplanes every month -- that's more than one plane every day -- but
they still spend 12 hours to attach the wings to the fuselage -- that’s the place where
you sit.
That's how solid they fit in there.
Todd Gray, engineering team leader at Boeing's Renton factory is one of the people in charge
of this process.
They just slide into the center wing box.
Uh, and then are fastened with about uh, 1600 bolts.
At this point, the two wings and the base of the airplane essentially become a single
piece, with that fuselage riding on top of them!
That's right, the wings aren't on the side of the plane, they're on the bottom.
And not only are they on the bottom, (called a low-wing) but they angle up slightly, called
a "dihedral."
Wings with a high dihedral make for a more inherently stable airplane.
Basically, if the pilot let go of the controls, inherently stable planes return to normal
flight more easily.
But where to put the wings is more of a design thing --
lower wings put engines and wings closer to maintenance, while
high wings allow trucks to drive underneath, and the fuselage to be right on the ground
to make it easy to load.
And while we're looking at that wing, think about its shape.
Wings are designed in a few different configurations: [
Rectangular, Elliptical, Swept and Delta.
According to NASA (the first A is for Aeronautical after all), the "go to" for powered jet flight
is the SWEPT wing.
Swept wings have less drag and work better at high altitude, but need more power to lift
the plane.
The 737, like pretty much all commercial jets, use the swept-wing designs.
Modern airplane wings are more or less like the wings from history;
they have a backbone, called a spar, ribs and stringers to give them shape, and control
surfaces that change the shape of the wing to give it more lift or drag.
Also stuffed in there are the fuel tanks!
But, not all wings are created equal.
When in flight, air is flowing around the wing beautifully -- except around the wingtip.
The tip of the wing creates little vortices, pushing up and down on the end of those wing
-- making it less efficient.
So now, you'll see wings with this flipped-up wingtip, called a winglet, which keep the
air pressing up on the wing!
They're really there for fuel efficiency, so we get an extra few percent of fuel burn
uh, on the airplane with that performance of the wing tip.
That's right.
With the amount of flights that these things fly, you know, in the amount of a month or
a year uh, that adds up to big dollars for our airline customer.
Since a quarter of all the airplanes in all of the fleets of the world are Boeing 737s,
engineers and mechanics have a huge amount of data on the stresses and safety of these
airplanes.
And they're still improving!
They just started putting winglets on all the planes a few years ago!
Thanks for watching DNews everybody, for more about Boeing and a century of innovation check
out TheAgeOfAerospace.com And if you're curious about how a group of kids could come together
and build an airplane from scratch watch this video.
Thanks for watching everybody!
Let us know down in the comments if you would ride in that airplane and subscribe so you
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