How To: Apply Newton's laws of motion to cruise with NASA

See how Newton's laws of motion apply to an aircraft's cruise performance with this educational video from NASA -- the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the leading resource for space exploration. There's no better place to learn about aerospace and Newton's three laws of motion and how they apply to aeronautics than NASA.

This NASA video segment from "Flight Testing Newton's Laws" explores how Newton's laws can be used to assess an airplane's cruise performance. By watching an instructor at NASA's National Test Pilot School, viewers learn how an aircraft's cruise performance is evaluated and how this performance can be maximized. Viewers also learn how to rearrange the lift and drag equations to find the ratio of the coefficient of lift to the coefficient of drag that will provide maximum performance. Using a graph of these coefficients, the instructor demonstrates how to solve for the maximum endurance speed of the plane and then tests the calculation in an airplane.