yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How Helicopters Fly | Science of Stupid: Ridiculous Fails


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Renaissance artist and all-around smart cookie Leonardo da Vinci famously painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But he also may have been the first person to design one of these—nope, not the wakeboard, that thing in the sky also known as a helicopter.

[Music]

And it's not only wakeboarders; the helicopter pilots are helping out.

[Music]

The best can use their skills to save calves from frozen lakes. Da Vinci was ahead of his time, although there were less cow rescues in his pictures from memory. But before a pilot can head off for a little cow skimming, they need to know their heli science.

A helicopter generates lift from its rotating blades. Adjusting the collective pitch changes the angle of all blades simultaneously, allowing the helicopter to increase or decrease in altitude. Adjusting the cyclic pitch will change the angle of each blade at specific parts of its rotation, creating more lift on one side, leading to forwards, backwards, and side-to-side motion. Changing the pitch of the tail rotor blades rotates the helicopter left or right, like a rudder. Thus, you need to master a combination of cyclic pitch, collective pitch, and tail rotor pitch for successful flight.

Okay, let's take it one step at a time. First, we need to take off, which is easier said than done in a homemade car copter. Well, this doesn't look dangerous. Please fasten your seat belts, as we may be experiencing some turbulence and a touch of impact force. The faster he's pulled, the quicker the blades auto-rotate, which eventually creates enough lift to race him.

But as the car copter rotates to the side, that lift force makes it travel sideways faster than his rudder can correct. Luckily, the pilot was fine, which is more than can be said for the Reliant Robin. Maybe best stick to a proper helicopter with an actual tail rotor.

[Music]

This research pilot is using a combination of collective pitch to descend and cyclic pitch to move forwards. Now for the perfect landing. Ah, that wasn't important, was it? A sudden dip in collective pitch causes blades to intersect with the power line, so it's shorted. But I don't think anyone noticed. Yeah, that might be a bit of a giveaway.

Yes, like take-off, coming in for a landing can be the trickiest skill. Nailed that one though! The pilot adjusts the cyclic pitch to create more lift on the right-hand side, drifting the helicopter to the left. But the building has possibly affected the airflow and his aerodynamics, so the pilot decides to teach it a lesson. I mean, I could see it coming, but then again, I am cyclic.

[Music]

More Articles

View All
Meet Jeff, a creator of AP Statistics on Khan Academy | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
I was a teacher for 10 years in Kazu Public Schools. They’re a midsize urban district in Southwest Michigan. In my first three years, I taught Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2—the core math classes. But I also taught an introductory statistics course. Then,…
Pinstriping my Lotus Exige S240 for $7
What’s up? You think Mornington granted today is going to be a fun game? I’m all the ways of red clay and my God, I wore last week judgment. Lots of luck, and I got this off of eBay, like six dollars in China. What it is, it’s the final lightning pink. I …
High on Life': San Francisco’s Skaters Get Groovy | Short Film Showcase
There’s never a moment where I feel satisfied with skating. It’s always in you, and then when you find, when you take the skates off, you move through life skating. When I come out here to skate, I come out here to find this other space that’s just incred…
The 10 WORST Investing Mistakes to Make (Investing For Beginners)
One of the trends we’ve seen over the past few years is there’s been a lot of new investors entering the market. In Robin Hood’s most recent quarterly data, they showed that in the past 12 months, they’ve doubled the amount of funded accounts. In their S1…
David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and The Human Race, Part 1
My goal would be not to do yet another podcast with David Deutsch; there are plenty of those. I would love to tease out some of the very counter-intuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, an…
Introduction to car buying | Car buying | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
So, you’re looking to buy a car. So, I’ll at least tell you how I would approach buying a car. The first thing is thinking about what you can afford, and I would think about that before you even look at the types of cars you might want to buy. Because it …