Hey, I'm Nate from Design Squad.

This week, we had a question in to the Design Squadwebsite from a person who wanted to know, how does an airplane lift off the ground?

That's a great question, and you used a very specific word in your question that partly helps answer it.

That word is "lift."

Now, airplanes need two things to fly.

One is lift.

Now, lift is the force that actually makes it get pushed upward.

If the airflow's moving fast enough across the wing, above the wings we get low pressure.

Below the wings, we get higher pressure.

So what we have is basically lower pressure up here and higher pressure... down below.

That's what we call lift.

Now, what creates that airflow?

That's where the second thing that we need comes in, and that's called thrust.

Now, the thrust comes in in that helps the airplane move forward very fast, creating that airflow that produces the lift.

Lift and thrust.

With a paper airplane, you're probably familiar with the thrust from throwing it.

Now here's a cool way to produce the thrust in a really consistent way that you might not know about.

Make a paper airplane like you normally would.

And I love the classic design.

Now we're going to add a catapult.

Now I'm going to use my scissors to carefully make a very small cut.

I use a pen to open it up.

And now I can push through the rubber band, also using the pen.

Now loop the rubber band through itself.

Now you can loop the rubber band over your thumb.

And this might take a little bit of practice to get really good at.

I know I've been practicing for a long time on this one.

Pull back the catapult and launch.

Now, they use catapults almost exactly like this with jets on aircraft carriers.

If you think about how short an aircraft carrier runway is, it's really, really short, which means they need a lot of thrust.

And they use gigantic versions of catapults just like this to launch those jets right in the air.

Very cool.

What other ways can you think of to produce thrust for an airplane that'll make lift?

Let us know on the Design Squadwebsite.