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2
The Flight Environment: Standard Atmosphere
In this chapter, we will discuss the properties of the environment for flight testing – Earth's atmosphere. It is critical to understand the nature of the atmosphere, since aircraft performance depends significantly on the properties of air. For example, the lift produced by the aircraft is proportional to the air density, and the amount of power produced by an internal combustion engine also varies with density. For these two reasons, aircraft performance decreases as density decreases. We will see in this chapter that density decreases with altitude, so key aircraft performance metrics such as takeoff distance, rate of climb, acceleration, etc. all degrade with altitude. Since aircraft performance depends significantly on the local properties of