If you’ve flown out of Colorado Springs or Denver’s airports, you may have noticed how long it takes to take off compared to other places you fly to. But our weather this winter is actually helping our planes take off faster and save fuel too.
Airplanes need lift to fly. They get that lift from the shape of their wings. Air flows faster above the wing than under it… This increases air pressure under the wing that pushes the plane up.
Colorado presents some issues. Colorado Springs has eighty percent of the air pressure at sea level and Denver has about eighty-five percent. This means planes need to fly faster here to take off… and it takes them longer to get up to speed because their engines have less air to use. But Colorado has very cold winters. And cold air is dense and heavy.
Our airplanes use this to their advantage. Because cold air is dense… airplane engines get more air and don’t need to work as hard. As a result, they use less gas and produce more power.
Let’s put this in context. Colorado Springs Airport has runways about two miles long. In summer, your flight might need one and a half miles to take off. But with temperatures in the twenties… it could need a mile and a quarter. This might not sound like a big difference, but it means you need ten percent less fuel to get in the sky.
On a typical jetliner, that saves a couple of tons of fuel per plane... around a thousand dollars worth. Now multiply that by the thousands of takeoffs each day along the Front Range.
So the point is... there’s a great benefit to all this cold air we’ve been dealing with. If you like cleaner air, and clearer skies... you can thank the brutally cold weather we’ve been dealing with for it.
Editor's Note: The original version of this story reported that air flows slower over the top of the wing than the bottom. This is incorrect. Air flows faster above the wing than underneath it: this results in lower pressure above the wing than below the wing, creating lift.
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