This week my mind has been blown after reading a kids book about planes.
Bear with me here.
I was reading it (with someone a little younger than myself) and realised that I’d never really thought about where the fuel was stored in a plane.
After seeng countless Hollywood films where some aircraft explosion has taken place, my brain has always coupled these visuals with the fuel being stored somewhere in the body of the plane- but now I realise that this is all for artistic effect!
To my astonishment, this book totally schooled me by showing me something I’d either never considered, or never actualy thought about properly before.
The penny dropped.
My brain engaged and thinking about the physics behind it, it really does make sense. Storing the fuel IN THE WINGS is probably the best place for it.
The weight needs to be well distributed and serves a purpose to balance the aircrafts throughout the flight and if it’s too far back it makes the nose rise, and too close to the nose, you would’t be able to get into the air!
I did kind of consciously know that the fuel gets injected/pumped in under the wings – but I’d always thought that it was just pumped into pipes that then took it to a main storage place in the body of the plane.
But no.
Apparently it’s all just stored actually IN THE WINGS.
With the sheer amount of fuel that’s needed for a global flight (and the fact that it can make up to 1/3 of the weight of the entire plane), this totally makes sense.
I’ve now read that a 747 travelling full capacity could burn through 4L per second(!). So that means that there’s proabably around 80,000L of fuel being carried in one of these planes for a long-haul flight. Yikes, that’s a lot of weight to carry around on take off.
Well there you go, you learn something new every day!