• Question: why arn't pigs able to fly?

    Asked by cheezybeanz to timcraggs, Mark, Jo, Donna on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by anon-1953.
    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      lol, well I suppose it is because they don’t have wings. You could strap wings to them but they’d be quite big and I don’t think the pig would like it much. Anything’s possible though as mathematically, bees shouldn’t be able to fly and they manage it quite well. Their wings are technically not big or fast enough to keep it in the air but it manages it.

      Do you fancy going halves with me and we’ll make some pig wings?

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hehe.

      It depends what you mean by fly! If you put them in an aeroplane they would fly, or if you launched them at escape velocity into orbit, they could fly around the earth indefinitely!

      However, to answer your question: Pigs are not able to fly because they haven’t evolved with the capability to do so. They would probably need to be a bit more aerodynamic in their shape, and would also need some sort of wing. Without these things, they are not able to fly of their own accord. (At least to my knowledge!)

    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Why can’t pigs fly…? Well, obviously it would help if they had wings! Apart from that, they would also be too heavy/dense to fly successfully, unless they had gigantic wings. A physicist would be able to calculate how large a wingspan they would require to fly. Of course, pigs do fly quite comfortably in aeroplanes.

    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      To fly you need two things – have something resembling wings and be able to move forward very quickly. Wings are a clever shape – air hitting the front of the wing recombines at the back and given that the length of the wing on top is longer than on the bottom it means that the air moving across the top of the wing has to go faster than the air on the botton — this difference in the speeds of the airflows at the top and bottom of the wing causes a pressure difference (high pressure below and low pressure above wing) and hence an upthrust (air always moves from low to high pressure). The faster the air moves across the wing (hence the need for a large horizontal velocity) and the greater the pressire drop the greater the lift. Obviously the heavier you are the more lift you need (since gravity is acting downwards) which equates to wings of a greater surface area – so three things are not in the pigs favour – they have no wings, they aren’t particularrly quick runners and they are quite chubby…

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