Coriolis Force - Q4b: Aircraft Bank Angle

We calculate the bank angle of an aircraft that is needed to counter the effect of the rotation of the Earth (i.e., the Coriolis force effect). The aircraft in this problem is flying in the zonal direction from the West towards the East. Part a of this problem calculates the Coriolis force exerted on this airplane.

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[bluemarblescience]

Very good explanation. I've done similar calculations in a number of my videos over the years. I often have people ask if I can prove this with instrumentation in the aircraft and that's a very difficult thing to do because the Coriolis force is so small and other factors overshadow it by at times, orders of magnitude. Forces like cross winds or imbalances due to asymmetric wing loading caused by fuel burn have a much more pronounced effect. And in reality, we don't try to correct for these disturbing forces by holding a bank angle. Instead, we fly an indicated heading that results in our airplane maintaining the desired ground track. So passengers will never actually be able to feel the correction that we're making because it's a heading correction. But the effects are there. They're very real and they have to be corrected for.