It took me, like, three goddamn weeks to pick a title for this thing. I hate picking titles. Whenever I'd write a research paper, titles were the best part. At two or three in the morning on the day a paper was due (because it's more exciting to do the whole thing the night before it's due), I'd be a bit loopy and ready for the two hours' sleep I'd get before we all had to wake up at six in the damn morning. I'd go for the looniest, borderline unprofessionalest (sometimes entirely unprofessional) thing I could think of, and expand upon it. With mixed results, of course, but still, it was my favorite part of writing a paper.
But I got to do that at the end. It was the finishing touch. Here, I have to pick it before I can even start! What the hell. I hate this title already, because it's exceedingly dorky.
If you ever talk with a pilot, or anyone with any experience in the aviation field, or even one of those awkward guys who wear Ray Bans unironically and hang around at airports, they'll probably mention that something is "behind the power curve." It has to do with aerodynamics, specifically drag, and how an airplane behaves at different speeds. There are two (three, really) types of drag: induced drag and parasitic drag. Induced drag has to do with the air becoming turbulent around the wingtips, producing something called wingtip vortices. These get smaller as the angle of attack gets smaller, which gets smaller as you go faster (as a general rule...not always. But I'm being too verbose as it is). So if you plot it on a graph, it looks like an exponential curve that descends from left-right. Parasitic drag comes from the shape of the airplane itself. Things that have airflow around them produce parasitic drag, it's unavoidable. You can minimize it (this is why golf balls have those little indentations in them), but you can never totally eliminate it. As you increase your speed, parasitic drag increases, while induced drag is decreasing into negligibility. It looks like an exponential curve that's ascends from left-right.
Put the two together, you get a bell-curve looking thing. If you do some magic math and sum the two together at each point along the curves, you get an ACTUAL inverted bell curve thing, called total drag. The bottom of this curve is where you have the least drag acting on an aircraft, and that's super important for myriad reasons beyond the purpose of this post. Total drag is also referred to as the power curve.
To the right of this point, things are normal. If you want to go faster, you advance the throttle to go faster because you need more power to overcome the increased drag of an increased airspeed. You pull back on the throttle if you want to slow down. Simple.
Where it gets weird is to the left of that minimum drag point. See, it's a bell curve. To the right, as I just said, you add power...you go faster. But on the other side, the exact opposite is true. If you keep everything else in equilibrium, if you want to go slower you need to ADD power. Increase the throttle to go slower. If you want to go faster, you need to take out some power. It's weird, it's counterintuitive, and it's killed a lot of people. One of those "facts written in blood" sorts of things. It's a fine place to be, and often pilots need to fly in that range (for a good example, the Blue Angels do this in their show, it's called a "high alpha" maneuver. Everyone who takes lessons for a private pilot's license will do this on their first or second flight). But shit gets weird. It becomes a particularly dangerous phenomenon when you're trying to land. You can put yourself into a situation from which you cannot recover.
It's one of those cliches that has worked its way into general terminology. It's a metaphor for being stuck in a dangerous place with no way out. But as long as you can recognize it and take appropriate action, you can get out. To a point.
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