Build Your Own Glider – Forces and Flight

Sea birds like gulls soar easily into the sky, carried by the air currents around the cliffs where the live.  Like gulls, gliders have long, slender wings and use upward moving air (called thermals), or air rising over hillsides, to carry them high into the sky without needing an engine.

You will build a glider and use Newton’s Laws of Motion to implement a perfect, or as good as you can get, flight.  You will then use Newton’s Laws to analyze the motion and forces involved in the mechanics of flight.

Materials Needed:

Thin cardboard (to cut the 2 ´ 12-inch main wing,

a 1.25 ´ 4-inch tail wing,

and a triangular 2 ´2-inch fin piece)

Modeling Clay

Thin wooden dowel (skewer)

Adhesive of some type (hot glue gun/sticks or rubber cement)

How To Make It:

Glue the cardboard main wing to the fuselage (skewer) a third of the way from its end.  Glue the tail to wing the fuselage and add the triangular fin.  Use a ball of modeling clay on the nose of your glider as a balance weight.

Test Flights:

You are the engineer and the pilot!!  You must create a successful flight by determining why the glider may not be flying properly, and correcting the problem.  Hold the plane by the fuselage, just behind the wings and throw it gently forward.  If the plane dives steeply, the balance weight is too heavy, so remove some of the clay and try again.  If the plane climbs sharply, then stalls into a dive, add more weight to the nose.  Change the balance weight until your plane glides in a gentle dive for a perfect flight.