General Science and Basic Aviation Knowledge
This section combines general science - human biology, health, ecology and earth science - with the aviation fundamentals an officer cadet is expected to know before flight training.
Science essentials
- The heart has four chambers; the right side pumps blood to the lungs and the left side to the body; O negative is the universal donor.
- Digestion begins in the mouth; enzymes act on specific substrates; the small intestine absorbs nutrients.
- Photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen using chlorophyll and light.
- Food chains transfer energy, and only about 10% passes to the next trophic level.
Aviation essentials
- Four forces act on an aircraft: lift, weight, thrust and drag. In straight, level, unaccelerated flight, lift equals weight and thrust equals drag.
- Lift depends on wing shape, angle of attack and airspeed; increasing the angle of attack raises lift until the critical angle, beyond which the wing stalls.
- The troposphere holds most weather and most of the atmosphere’s mass; temperature generally falls with height until the tropopause.
- Primary controls: ailerons roll about the longitudinal axis, the elevator pitches about the lateral axis, the rudder yaws about the normal axis.
- Basic instruments: altimeter (height), airspeed indicator, attitude indicator, heading indicator. The speed of sound near sea level is about 340 m/s, or Mach 1.
Worked example
An aircraft climbs at 500 ft per minute from 2,000 ft for 8 minutes. Gain = 500 × 8 = 4,000 ft, so the new altitude is 2,000 + 4,000 = 6,000 ft. The reasoning is rate × time with consistent units; the commonest error is mixing feet and metres.
Traps that cost marks
- Believing lift comes only from the upper surface of the wing; both surfaces and the downwash contribute.
- Confusing pitch with roll and yaw, or the elevator with the ailerons.
- Mixing knots, km/h and m/s, or feet with metres in altitude questions.
Learn the four forces, three axes and three controls cold - they appear in almost every paper.