Boeing 747 in cruise at roughly 35000 feet, showing contrails from the four engines.
The cruise portion of a flight usually consists of heading (direction of flight) changes only. Typically a constant airspeed (in Mach Number) and altitude will be maintained until the aircraft arrives near the destination and then enters the descent phase of flight. For most commercial passenger aircraft, the cruise phase of flight is where most of its fuel is burned. This lightens the aircraft considerably and for minimum fuel consumption, the aircraft needs to cruise-climb to higher altitudes. For operational and Air Traffic Control reasons, staying at the Flight Level it has been allocated is the most expedient option. However, on Long Haul flights, the aircraft may climb from one Flight Level to a higher one periodically, to minimise its fuel consumption. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (811x660, 255 KB) Aircraft in cruise at roughly 35,000 feet above Bristol, England. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (811x660, 255 KB) Aircraft in cruise at roughly 35,000 feet above Bristol, England. ... The Boeing 747, commonly called the Jumbo Jet, is one of the most recognizable modern jet airliners and is the largest airliner currently in airline service. ... Contrails are condensation trails (sometimes vapour trails): artificial cirrus clouds made by the exhaust of aircraft engines or wingtip vortices which precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in moist, frigid upper air. ... An aircrafts heading is referenced by using either the magnetic compass or directional gyro, two instruments that most aircraft have as standard. ... This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ... Mach number (Ma) (pronounced in British English with a Germanic ch, as mack or mark and as mock in American English) is defined as a ratio of the speed of an object or flow relative to the speed of sound in the medium through which it is travelling: Vo/Vs... Altitude is the elevation of an object from a known level or datum. ... A descent during air travel is any portion where an aircraft decreases altitude, and is the opposite of an ascent. ...
Commercial or Passenger Aircraft are usually designed, in principle, for optimum performance at their cruising speed or VC. The designer will try to maximize the Lift / Drag (L/D) ratio of the airframe for that speed. Ideally, designers will look to maximise the (L/D) for a range of speeds, as commercial aircraft have to fly at non optimum speeds and altitudes for operational reasons. Commercial aircraft manufacturers have to form a view on whether it is better to design aircraft with high levels of L/D but over a narrow range of speeds or vice versa. VC may stand for: vehicular cycling Venture capital Vice-county Victoria Cross Viet Cong Vinyl chloride Virginia Central Railway (AAR reporting mark VC) virtual circuit Visual C++ Volkov Commander (file manager) Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: ISO country code This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages... Airframe is a novel by renowned author Michael Crichton first published in hardback edition in 1996 and as a paperback edition in 1997. ...
There will also be an optimum cruise altitude for a particular aircraft type and condition (its payload and speed). This altitude is usually where the combination of L/D ratio and engine efficiency will be maximum. Altitude is the elevation of an object from a known level or datum. ...
A cruise missile is a guided missile which uses a lifting wing and most often a jet propulsion system to allow sustained flight.
Cruise missiles are well-suited to assassination, but most organizations with the means to fund development avoid assassination as a policy.
However, the same counterargument applies to cruise missiles as to other types of UAVs, which is that cruise missiles are still cheaper than human pilots when total training and infrastructure costs are taken into account, not to mention the intrinsic value of human life.
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