The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [68]
HOW TO FLY IT
To fly, the plane needs power and spin. Hold it fully in your palm, facing forward. As you pull your arm back, ready to throw, flick your wrist and fingers. But, here’s the trick: do not let your wrist or hand bend downward. Keep them straight up. This gives the plane spiral spin.
Be ready to use your determination and patience, as it may take some practice to perfect this technique. Once you have it down, though, your unique airplane will fly beautifully. And you’ll use this same technique for tossing a football, so here you’ve learned two skills in one.
WHY IT WORKS
Airplanes—real and paper—stay in the air for two reasons. Understand these reasons, including a few technical terms, and you will possess the mental tools to design many a flying object.
Reason 1: The lift force is greater than the airplane’s weight.
Lift is what keeps the plane up in the air. It happens when the air pressure pushing the plane up is more powerful than the pressure of air pushing the plane down. Lift counters the force of gravity, which always pulls objects back down to Earth.
Reason 2: The thrust force is stronger than drag.
Thrust gets the plane moving forward. In paper airplanes, thrust is the power of your toss. In real airplanes, designers keep materials as light as possible and use powerful engines. The heavier a plane is, the more thrust it needs.
Thrust counteracts drag, which is any quality that makes it harder to cut through the air (like sideways gravity). Here’s a great way to explain drag: Turn your hand flat, palm down, and wave it back and forth, slicing the air horizontally. Then turn your hand sideways, thumbup, pinkie-down, and wave it through the air, as if you are clapping or fanning yourself. Feel how much more air is in your way when your hand is sideways? That’s drag. For airplanes, drag is the force of the air the plane must push through to get where it wants to go.
Airplanes fly when engines and wing design counter gravity and drag. Paper airplanes fly when you thrust them with gusto that overcomes gravity, and when they have a shape that is low-drag and can gracefully slice through the air. This creative design accomplishes everything you need to soar your new air flyer.
Albigail Adams’ Letters with John Adams
LETTER WRITING, real letter writing, is a storied part of American life. Friends and spouses built relationships, and political thinkers changed the world, by expressing their thoughts and sending them through the mail.
The correspondence between Abigail Adams and John Adams during the American Revolution tops the list of our country’s famous letter writing, both for the couple’s modern relationship and the important political events they discussed. The relationship was modern because John so valued the opinions of Abigail, who was well educated and believed learned women had much to contribute to society. The events they discussed were so important because they shaped the birth of our nation, and John would later become the second President of the United States.
Abigail Adams, born Abigail Smith, came of age as a member of the wealthy Smiths of Massachusetts Bay Colony, related to the Quincys on her mother’s side. Many generations of men in her family had studied at Harvard, but, as the college didn’t accept girls, Abigail’s mother and grandmother tutored her at home in math, literature, and writing.
John Adams was the son of a shoemaker from Braintree, Massachusetts, and his mother helped run their family’s farm. He earned a law degree from Harvard. They met because Abigail’s sister Mary courted and then married John’s close friend Richard Cranch. Several years later, in 1764, John and Abigail married; Abigail was a few days shy of twenty, and John, several years older, had just