This is Why Wings Don’t Fall Off Airplanes

When you travel through the air, it can be easy to forget exactly how lucky it is that you are to be alive in this era of technology. Sure, complacency for being grateful might just make you complain about certain things like delays and certain other little aspects of a flight that really don’t mean much like a lack of food being served on board. However, when you take a moment to really sit back and think about how stuff like this works, you need to stop and realize that you’re flying along with a couple of hundred other people, thousands of feet in the air, to a location that might’ve been completely inaccessible a couple of generations ago. You’re basically in a mechanical bird and it’s a miracle!

This time, we take a look at one of the most basic yet awe-inspiring aspects of flying that will show you exactly how your airplane manages to stay in the air. I mean, when traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, how exactly do the wings stay nice and fixed in place to help that heavy duty fuselage stay nice and high above the ground and dealing with turbulence?  It might seem like an incredibly simple concept but when you look into all that goes into it, the concept just so happens to be anything but simple. The engineering that goes into something like this is incredibly important because after all, the reliability of a wing does hold human life in its hands, after all.

If you follow along with the video below, you’ll learn all about the basics behind such a concept, including how it takes 1600 bolts to hold the plane wing on and how this wing is not attached to the side of the plane but instead, the bottom is what is used to make sure that the fixture stays put. On the surface, it really does seem like something that might be pretty simple but when you start to really get into it, one can really get a keen sense of appreciation for all that the people behind these kinds of things are able to accomplish.