n order to understand the everyday use of radar and the physics of flight, we took an industrial visit to Shoreham airport a small airport, which is fairly local. The airport has a very long history going back all the way to 1911 not long after the first manned flight in a “heavier than air” flying machine by the Wright brothers in 1903. History In 1930 the municipal authorities of Brighton, Hove and Worthing formed a joint committee to establish Shoreham as the municipal airport for three towns.
Construction on the Terminal Building began in November 1934. During World War II, Shoreham Airport was used as a training facility for pilots, and also housed a training dome for Anti air and Bomber gunners. The dome is now a listed building and is one of the last surviving gunner training domes in the country. After the War, the introduction of jet aircraft brought about the end of Shoreham as a passenger flight airfield, however it has maintained itself as an airport for many private light aircraft and helicopters, as well as the Sussex police/hospital helicopter.
Flight ‘Heavier than air’ flying machines must have someway of taking off from the ground; they must be self-propelled, and must have some way to create lift, (aeroplanes have wings, and helicopters have rotor blades). There are two main ways for wings to create lift; The Longer Path, (Bernoulli or equal transit time) explanation and the Newtonian, (momentum transfer or deflection) explanation.
The longer path explanation works on the theory that if an object hits air, all particles of air passing around the object will meet again on the other side. This means that if an object is shaped in a particular way so that the top side of the object is longer from front to back than the underside, then when particles of air go above and below the object the fact that particles above the wing are travelling faster than the ones below it means that the two pressures are different. The low pressure above the wing and high pressure below it cause lift.
This explanation is flawed in several ways however, although in practice it normally works, the theory isn’t completely right. For example; when a group of air particles hit an object and go all different ways around it, there is no logical reason to assume that they should rejoin on the other side. The alternative explanation to that is the Newtonian explanation, originally worked out by Isaac Newton as a way to make more efficient, faster boats. However, since water and air are both fluids, the theory also works in air.
In the late 1600’s Newton theorized that air molecules behave like individual particles, and that the air hitting the underside of a wing behaves like shotgun pellets hitting a metal plate. Each individual particle bounces off the bottom of the wing and due to Newton’s third law which states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the bouncing particles push the wing slightly, and with sufficient speed these tiny pushes would give significant lift.