X-29 NASA EXPERIMENTAL T-Shirt

How does an airplane fly? Most of us have probably seen or felt wind blowing things like flags or kites around. But how is it possible that heavy airplanes (some weighing almost half a million pounds, or more than 200,000 kilograms) are able to be supported by air high above the ground? The answer may sound strange at first, but it's actually the air that is pushing the airplane's wings and the rest of it up. The air under the wings pushes up more than the air on top of the wings pushes down. This "pushing" by the air is called air pressure. We can think of air pressure as air "press"-ing down or up against something else. On a windy day, you can actually feel the air pressure push against your body. The wings of an airplane "feel" a similar pushing, but there happens to be a bigger pressure under the wings and a smaller pressure on the top. What's really amazing is why this happens. The special shape of an airplane's wing makes the air moving around it behave in a certain way. If we look at an airplane's wing from the side, we can see that the wing is a special shape called an airfoil.