Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to describe how flying machines and various organisms use balanced and unbalanced forces to control their flight. The museum offers two accounts of Ibn Firnas's landing, with Maqqari's explanation of it by a missing tail, and NASA Glenn's diagram of steady gliding, in which the forces balance; control by rudders and ailerons, and the examples of birds and insects, have to come from your class. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- D2.3 describe ways in which flying machines and various organisms use balanced and unbalanced forces to control their flight
2 Before you start
A thought to carry into the lesson.
3 The lesson
When are forces balanced?
Throw a paper glider a short way from a low place and watch it. Write down when it seemed to move at a steady speed and direction and when one of them changed. What do you think changed in the forces when it changed?
What do we read in accounts?
Read the card on the two accounts of the landing and compare what each account says about the ending. What is still unknown, after both, about Ibn Firnas's wings?
Go deeper
Maqqari attributes the landing difficulty to a missing tail, comparing a bird's landing: an explanation within the narrative, not a modern aerodynamic test of the lost apparatus 2. TDV repeats the missing tail and hard landing, but repetition in a modern biography does not independently supply engineering plans or measurements 3. Of Ibn Firnas the record says that the text supplies few elements, so wing area, inclination and control mechanism cannot be recovered from it 2.
How do we know?
The inspected witness is Maqqari in the Ihsan Abbas edition; the editor refers to al-Mughrib and al-Muqtabis, whose original passages were not read as separate witnesses 4. The record of the reported flight therefore presents the account as transmitted, with disputed details, not as an experimental log with recalculable measurements.
Think about it
In NASA Glenn's steady-glide diagram the speed and direction do not change 5, while Maqqari explains the difficulty of landing by a missing tail 2. If the forces are balanced in a steady glide, what must change in them when a glider slows down to land, and why does the account of Ibn Firnas not let you say how his wings did it?
Into the museum
- Abbas ibn Firnas: his life, the crafts attributed to him, and the limits of what is known.
- Ibn Firnas's reported winged flight: the missing-tail explanation in Maqqari and what Hasan Ibrahim Hasan says in contrast.
- Cordoba: the city his life was tied to.
Try this
In the record of Ibn Firnas's attempt compare the two accounts of the landing: underline what each says about the ending, then write one sentence on what a reader cannot learn from either. Do not try to jump from a height.
4 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Ibn Firnas's reported winged flight have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Two accounts of the landing. Al-Maqqari reports that Abbas ibn Firnas covered himself with feathers, fitted two wings and attempted flight, suffering injury on landing. Maqqari attributes the landing difficulty to a missing tail, comparing a bird's landing: an explanation within the narrative, not a modern aerodynamic test. Hasan Ibrahim Hasan describes unharmed survival. If you were steering a glider, what would you want at the back?
In your own words: what does Ibn Firnas's reported winged flight have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Balanced, yet still moving. In NASA Glenn's steady-glide diagram the force components are balanced while motion continues: equilibrium here does not mean hovering, but unchanged speed and direction in the simplified model. Weight is vertical, while lift and drag are oriented relative to an inclined path. The museum's record says al-Maqqari gives no observation series testing these components. When are forces balanced while a glider is still moving?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: Science and Technology, Grades 1–8 (2022)
- 2. Nafh al-Tib min Ghusn al-Andalus al-Ratib — al-Maqqari, v.3 p.374
- 3. Abbas ibn Firnas — TDV, biography
- 4. Nafh al-Tib min Ghusn al-Andalus al-Ratib — al-Maqqari, v.3 pp.374–375 and note
- 5. Gliding and flight forces — NASA Glenn, Vector Balance of Forces for a Glider