@jb747 do you feel that now you've stopped flying, your sleep patterns have returned to normal and you feel like you have a better quality of life?
A dramatic change to the way I sleep, and how I feel. No jet lag is a wonderful feeling. You literally never recovered from it when you were working. At the moment, I think I'm solar powered. Sun goes down...me too. Or perhaps that's an age thing.
Well, I was going to say that flight itself is physics. The safety related feature had me stumped, when does a basic requirement for flight (lift drag etc.) become a safety feature? I'm still confused on that one.
I guess there's a split between safety features and engineering features. FBW has made aircraft safer, but that's not really physics per se.
Weight and balance comes into play because an aircraft will crash if the balance goes too far out, at either end. It changes in flight, as fuel is used, or if you're unlucky enough to have cargo shift. And, as you say, there's lot of physics in why they fly, but that's not a specifically a safety feature.
The reason doors won't open in flight is simple physics, and something most people don't understand.
You've mentioned radar, but there's a bit more too it. Look up doppler radar. And phased arrays.
Gyroscopes make instrument flying possible. The calculus of acceleration, velocity and distance is at the heart of INS. Lasers come in to play in laser ring gyros. A simple turn and slip indicator as fitted to a light aircraft uses a gyro that's mounted with its axis parallel to the wing.
Collapsible floor panels exist to stop the floor caving in during depressurisation.
Chemical emergency oxygen generators exist in many aircraft. That's a bit of chemistry/physics that I don't understand.
Aircraft become very hot, and also very cold. There are sometimes visible expansion joints. The SR-71 corrugations were part of managing heat expansion. The A380 has a stainless steel strip on the lower fuselage just aft of the wing....
