You're right about a barrel roll, of course, I like that you can
rotate the wings through 360 degrees and maintain 1 G.

You could also, I think, start the 'roll' with an upward velocity
component of 320 feet a second and end it level, but hardly at the
same altitude (you'd be 1600 feet higher).

An even more interesting question would be, is there an airplane that
can fly this flight path? I think it would take massive control
surfaces to be able to pull a G with the yoke.


On Jun 14, 9:55 pm, Matt Whiting wrote:
wrote:
Jim, you don't have to do the physics for a 1 g roll. click on

stanford.edu/~sigman/one_g_roll.html for a really neat analysis.

Page down toward the end of sigman's article to see the actual flight
paths that it takes. It's a neat read.

Oh, for the nonbelievers in Newton and vector analysis and such (Mx
whatever comes to mind) don't bother.

A very nice analysis and it confirms that you can't execute a barrel
roll from straight and level flight while maintaining 1G. You either
lose a lot of altitude and end up in a steep dive or you have to pull up
(and thus exceed 1 G) if you want to end up at the starting altitude.
Case closed. :-)

Matt