Airports, Aeroplanes, and Air-rage

by Shapol Mohamed

For me, it is an all-too-familiar scene. Whenever I arrive at airport security checkpoints, the stony-faced customs official looks at me with suspicion; the beard raises a flag. When I approach the custom official, his heart rate soars to a sickening rhythm and bile washes up his nicotine-layered throat. I hand over my passport. His eyes widen and his jaws are on the brink of dropping: he notices my last name is “Mohamed.” And this is the best bit, he then says “Okay sir, could you come to the side for a RANDOM intensive security check?” Somehow, it is always random - I should carry out a statistical hypothesis test on whether this is actually random.

boarding a plane: stressful

It may be true that airports make my life much harder but for the vast majority of people, airports make their lives much easier. We can, thanks to air travel, go from one continent to another in a matter of hours. It is much better than being in a car for days. I do admit aeroplanes can be very hectic at times. You could be packed into an aircraft like as if you were sardines in a can, expect the passengers aren’t sardines - they are piranhas because they will bite your nose off if you breathe. Equally as annoying, could be when you are stuck in the aisle of an airplane waiting for some chump with a carry-on the size of a small bus trying to cram it into a space in the overhead locker the size of a toy car. If you are in this situation you may be experiencing air rage. This begs the question: “How could we possibly stop this rage-mania from occurring?”

Well, we need to change how we board aeroplanes. Currently, airlines follow the most boneheaded way possible. They ask the passengers to board from the front and fill the back. In a paper by Eitan Bachmat, he looks at different ways of boarding a plane. It turns out even boarding a plane at random is quicker than the method that current airlines use. The most efficient way of making everyone board is to make passengers board “outside-in” and back to front - so that those with window seats in the back row board first and then those with window seats in the middle and then moving on.

However, this is not practical and would require a lot of organisation.

It is almost a miracle that we can fly in an aircraft. One moment you are pelting along the ground, and the next minute your Airbus A380 - weighing nearly 600 tonnes, about as much as a dozen houses - is pitched backward, up in the air, completely safe. Barely a century ago, such things were unimaginable and we have come along away since the Wright Brothers just about flew a few hundred feet. How have we been able to defy physics and make heavier-than-air structures fly?

Wings are the most vital part of the aeroplane are the wings. It is where the turbines are placed, it holds the fuel and most importantly, its shape enables lift-off. The shape enables the air to flow around it. You can imagine trying to push this shape forward in a ball pool and it is hopefully obvious that it would be pushed upwards by the balls as you moved it along. This can be explained by Newton. He tells us that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” This means that pushing the balls down results in the wings being lifted up. However, this only accounts for a third of the total lift provided and this alone is not enough to lift the plane into the sky.

The rest of the lift is from something that is a bit less obvious in the ball pool. Behind the wing, there are fewer balls than there are below it, meaning the wing is sucked upwards by the comparatively low pressure. There is also an element of being accelerated along the wing and “squirting” the air downwards and backward. This is because at high speeds air is slightly viscous and “clings” onto the wings.