Air,
huh, yea, what is it good for,
pressure and density!

 

So what does air have to do with paper air planes some might wonder. You may think that air plays close to no roll but with it comes fluid like mechanics such as pressure and density. Density is a part of matter and is the mass per unit volume of a substance. Pressure is the force acting on an object at a perpendicular angle to a specified surface and is in newtons per meters squared.

 

DENSITY!!!!!
Hey, are you calling me dense? I guess you could say yes because all matter has density and so do I. Density is the amount of mass compacted into an area of an object. Get a glass of water and take a good look at it, it's density is the mass of the water contained in the area bounded by the glass. The equation for density is p=m/V which is density is equal to mass devided by volume. So why is this important you might ask. Well a paper airplane needs to fly does it not? Because of the equation for air resistance under the drag section, air density helps define the resitance the paper airplane is going to experience while in flight. Temperature is also a factor that relates to density. If a substance heats up, its molecules increase in bouncing around so they try to take up more room. That means if you have a container of a substance and you heat it up, it will try to expand which increases the volume. Larger volume equals less density.

 

PRESSURE!!!!!
Felling pressured to do something that you don't want to? Well that is close to how real pressure works. Pressure is the force diveded by area which is P=F/A. Because pressure is a scalar quantity it acts in all directions. So now you see that pressure acts on a paper airplane by exterting a force over the airplane. If the pressure of our standard atmosphere was higher such as the pressure of deep ocean water then our paper airplane might be crushed before even taking flight. The pressure of air is also dependant on the depth you go. There is a seperate equation that relates pressure to the parts of a fluid such as density, depth and gravitational field strength. This equation is P=pgh where P is pressure, p is density, g is gravitational strength and h is depth. This means that the higher someone goes in the air, the less pressure there is.