When sitting in a landing plane, you might have noticed a backward force, pushing against the plane and slowing it down. What causes this and how does it work?
When you’re flying on a commercial jet, you naturally become very familiar with the sound and feeling of the powerful turbine engines. As you take off, you can feel their rumbling muscle rocketing the whole vehicle forward and up into the sky. When it’s time for the plane to land, you might expect that rumbling feeling to simply stop, the turbines deactivated. However, instead of that, you feel the distinct sensation of force being pressed against you, as though they were firing in reverse as the plane comes to a stop.
Contrary to popular belief, this feeling of force is not the turbines spinning backwards. In fact, jet turbines can’t actually do that, or at least there’s no reason for them to do that. No, that feeling is the result of a special component of the jet engines aptly named the thrust reversers. It’s thanks to the thrust reversers that commercial jets can slow to a safe stop on the tarmac in a reasonable amount of time.Thrust reversers redirect the flow of exhaust to slow forward movement
Since a turbine engine generates force through rotation, you would expect simply spinning it the other way would create the reverse thrust a jet needs to slow down.
