[tdubhro1]

It’s a bit disappointing that an article purporting to educate us about something we should know but may be unaware of, is completely wrong about the example of how an airplane climbs - you don’t climb by pitching up, you have to increase power.

[rocqua]

Just pitching up will have you climb, but at the expense of losing velocity right?

[jacquesm]

Right up to the stall speed limit. You can't just keep pitching up, you'd have to apply some power too if you don't eventually want to run out of forward (air)speed.

In a glider you can't do that so there when in level flight you have a limited amount of forward momentum available to help you climb if the air itself isn't moving up, you are continuously trading altitude for speed and vv (easy to see in a dive: everybody expects you to gain speed in a dive because can all relate so something falling, it's obvious the reverse has to happen when you climb and the stall speed is a design parameter of the aircraft at a given altitude combined with a bunch of other factors).

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/27693/how-does-...

[jhugo]

Briefly.

[jbay808]

Fair. Perhaps a glider would have been a better example.

[nosianu]

How? A glider climbs when the air it is in rises faster than the airplane sinks in that air to maintain its forward speed.

If you pitch up you can only exchange speed for a little bit of altitude, briefly.

[jacquesm]

Exactly. A glider in air that doesn't rise is like a yo yo on a string, you need to add energy to the system (rising air, pulling up on the string at the right moment) to be able to overcome the eventual return to the ground state.