Plane Graphs Example

This example demonstrates how to use flight-mech to plot the polar and thrust-velocity graphs of a plane.

Imports

# Python imports
import os
import sys
sys.path.append("..")

# Additional imports
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Flight-Mech imports
from flight_mech.plane import Plane

Plane definition

Let us use in this case the Cessna Citation III defined in the database.

# Load the plane
plane = Plane("cessna_citation_III")

Polar Graph

We can now set the \(C_{L\alpha}\) coefficient which is missing in this model and plot the polar graph.

# Set the missing lift coefficient
plane.C_L_alpha = np.pi

# Plot the polar graph
plane.plot_polar_graph()

Thrust-Velocity graph

The thrust-velocity graph can be generated for a given list of altitude. It allows to visualize at which velocities the plane can fly for the given thrust.

# Plot the thrust speed graph at several altitudes
plane.plot_gliding_TV_graph([0, 3000, 6000, 9000, 13000])

c:\Users\paulc\Documents\Projets\Flight-Mechanics-Calculator\examples\..\flight_mech\plane.py:1207: RuntimeWarning: divide by zero encountered in divide
  T_array = self.P / self.f(alpha_array)
c:\Users\paulc\Documents\Projets\Flight-Mechanics-Calculator\examples\..\flight_mech\plane.py:302: RuntimeWarning: divide by zero encountered in divide
  v = np.sqrt(self.P / (.5 * rho * self.S * self.C_L(alpha)))