Ever since the tender age of 14, when I was struck with an epic case of mononucleosis that left me nearly bed-bound for six months, my life has been an epic battle between lift and drag.   Power is sometimes referred to as energy, as in Einstein’s “e=mc²” formula, or, as I like to call it, the “it” in Burt Bacharach’s “What’s It All About, Alfie?” In car and airplane engines, power is often quite anachronistically referred to by the number of horses required to get you from here to there, as if horses could fly!

All sorts of things impact power, which is why it is so important and even occasionally interesting.   Chemicals, such as gasoline and caffeine, which to me serve very similar functions, have a big impact on power.   I know my airplane can’t get off the ground without gasoline in its tanks, and I can hardly make it to the kitchen without caffeine in mine.  But the world around us also has a lot to do with it.

If you happen to be in some sort of relationship with another human being, that relationship in so many ways can impact the amount of power you might have in the universe.  It could be a relationship with a partner who shares a bank account or has a desire to have power him or herself, a cantankerous boss who might be inclined to direct you to work for a living, or even an employee who manages to subvert the very direction in which you choose to aim your power.

Energy is a big part of flying, and some say its management is the most important thing to understand when learning to fly.   In a previous post I wrote about the phenomenon of being “behind the power curve,” which is the interesting thing that causes airplanes to do the opposite of what you tell it to do.  It is often how my life plays out every day, when I not only end up doing the opposite of what I tell my body it should be doing, but I also end up doing the opposite of what other people think my body should be doing.  That may have more to do with my mother than caffeine, but thinking those sorts of things leads to feeling like a victim which has the untoward effect of depleting one’s power.

Airplanes with propellors to my limited knowledge have engines that are designed to turn them.   The speed and strength with which they turn those propellors is the result of the power the engine generates, but airplane engines can’t work in a vacuum.   Just like their human companions, they require air to breathe, and just like their human companions, the density of the air they breathe effects how much power they generate.

You know that air gets thinner as altitude increases, until there is none left and you are in outer space.   Humans don’t breathe really well when there is no air, so if you want to live there you’re going to have to figure out a way to breathe.  As a result of air getting thinner, therefore having less molecules per box of space, most airplane engines lose about 3% of horsepower for every thousand feet they climb.  So if you’re flying at 10,000 feet, you are going to lose 30% of your power.

Now, I have tried it a few times and I know it’s true.   Furthermore, unless you have a pretty powerful engine, you’re not going to be able to make it too far upwards.   My Lycoming 360 normally-aspirated engine is rated to take me to about 16,000 feet, but I’ve never gotten it above 12,000 without it telling me in no uncertain terms that it didn’t have the energy to take me higher.   I felt as though it really wanted to, because I anthropomorphize things that need to be taken care of, but as much as it wanted to it just didn’t have it in her.  12,000 feet above sea level gets me over most of the mountains in these necks of the woods, so I don’t complain a lot, especially because I don’t have the budget to do much about it.  

But altitude is distance in only one of the dimensions in which we are aware we exist.  Getting above it all is really nice, I must tell you, and an extremely important trait to develop in this wild and crazy life.   But when your engine truly doesn’t have the power to get you there, there’s at least one more direction in which to travel, and as anyone who grew up in the Midwest will tell you, there’s a lot of that direction out there as well.  

Most pilots know this trick well, because even those pilots who cross oceans in big jets have spent time flying very low-powered aircraft.    It is, arguably, a lot more fun.  The trick is that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of power to get wherever it is that you want to go.   A little Piper Cub J-3 airplane with a Continental engine delivers only 65 horsepower, but it could take you to Timbuktu if you wanted it to and knew where the hell it was.   For that matter, one healthy horse that can swim probably could as well. It doesn’t take an Einstein to re-write the mass equivalence formula, and simply say that energy equals fuel times Times Square plus money plus motivation which I guess is just another form of energy.   Something like that.

This is where my lift and drag problem comes in, which in aviation lingo really turns out to be an energy management formula.   When there’s a load of drag on an airplane, let’s say your airplane suffers from something like fibromyalgia or chronic metal fatigue syndrome, lift suffers and so you need to put your nose down and get more airflow over your tired wings.   You’re just not going to go any higher, but you will go further and perhaps with a couple of more fuel stops you will eventually get where you are going.   You will be flying slower but potentially farther, and you may end up flying so slowly you can feel the buffet of a stall approaching.   It happens in life, which is why in my last biennial flight review Don Becker had me practice slow flight.   Slow down until you are flying right on the edge of a stall.   Sometimes it’s the only way to fly.