Whew! It’s hot even up here in the Pacific Northwest, and good grief–the temps down South and Southwest! Now even some commercial airlines are having flight delays because of the heat.
Ordinarily, summer’s a great time to fly–clear skies, great visibility, and longer days. It can get hot on the tarmac, though, while one’s doing a preflight, or waiting for clearance to taxi or take off. Once airborne, it’s cooler up there, though many small aircraft don’t have air conditioning. For those who don’t, they make blower system retrofits that circulate air flowing over ice, but they are bulky, heavy, and expensive. I will confess that as a student pilot, I occasionally took one of those “freezo” packs and tucked it beneath my shirt–all that glass in a small plane sitting on a runway can make one feel like a frog in a pot. There’s a scene in Fly Boy that alludes to this.
Still, these are merely issues of discomfort. It can get too hot for planes to leave the ground, though: the lift required to defeat gravity is provided by the air molecules rushing under the wing. It’s the same force you may remember as a kid, sticking your hand out the car window. If the air heats up, it expands, and the molecules get farther apart–less force to lift the plane off the ground. It doesn’t happen that often for a huge commercial jet, but it’s common for smaller planes, particularly at high altitudes or with shorter runways, to have to look at the temperatures in the summer, and arrange their departures for early in the morning, when the air is still dense.
Too hot to fly is perfect for reading, though! Take a VIP flight on me now through Tuesday, 7/25: Fly Boy is free in ebook (audio available everywhere but you can ask your library to get it to listen free–it’s on all library distributors)
Be safe out there in this heat, folks!
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