How does a Frisbee fly?
As you begin to move a Frisbee forward, the air in front of the Frisbee splits to flow either over the Frisbee or under it. Because of the Frisbee’s shape and the angle at which it’s held, the air that flows over the Frisbee has a longer distance to travel and arrives late at the back of the Frisbee. The air flowing under the Frisbee reaches the back first and initially flows upward, around the rear surface of the Frisbee. But once the Frisbee is moving fairly rapidly, this funny upward-flowing tail of air blows away from the back of the Frisbee. As it leaves, it draws the air flowing over the Frisbee with it and speeds that air up. As a result, the air over the Frisbee travels faster than the air under the Frisbee. But the airs above and below the Frisbee have the same amounts of total energy per gram. Since the faster moving air above the Frisbee has more kinetic energy than the slower moving air below the Frisbee, the air above the Frisbee must have less of some other form of energy
* Why is a Frisbee shaped the way it is? * What would it be like to compete in a world championship Frisbee competition? * How fast and how far can a Frisbee go? ———————————————————————— Discussion In the late 1940s Fred Morrison performed some experiments with flying discs. Some of the discs he experimented with were made out of metal while others were formed out of a new material called plastic. In 1955 the Wham-O Company purchased the rights and molds from Morrison. It wasn’t until the early 1960s when Frisbees became the rage. Whamo-O’s former General Manager Ed Headrick provided the organization and groundwork for the growth of the Frisbee craze. Today organized competitions take place each year around the world culminating in the World Frisbee Competition in California. Two factors influence the flight of a Frisbee, gravity and air. Gravity acts on all objects the same way, accelerating their mass towards the center of the Earth at
Robert M. Gary wrote: But wait a minute. A good frisbee thrower can make a frisbee rise straight up (like a golf ball does). The frisbee may take one path for awhile but then starts heading up, just like a properly hit golf ball (although not mine golf balls :)). The golf ball is well understood to rise as a result of its backward spin and low pressure on top (B). Anyone who claims that a golf ball just follows its original path has certainly never seen one properly hit. I haven’t seen an analysis of a golf ball, but I saw an analysis a while ago on a baseball. I think it may have been in Popular Mechanics, but I’m not sure of that. The claim was that a baseball could be thrown so as to rise (I forgot which type of pitch it is called) on its way to the plate. The article pretty clearly debunked this myth. The spin imparted to the ball can make it sink a little less slowly than a strict ballistic trajectory, but the RPM required to actually make the ball rise was something simply unatta
