Santa's sleigh could fly with NASA's Saturn V rocket engine

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Santa Claus needs more than his reindeer to fly.

A new study published in University of Leicester’s Physics Special Topics journal claims that Santa’s sleigh could actually fly with some major advancements — similar to those of NASA’s Saturn V rocket.

The physics students behind the study were inspired by the scene in 2003’s “Elf” in which Santa harnesses a jet engine to power his sleigh.

The students wanted to create a simple model addressing what exactly would keep a sleigh from flying under such circumstances.

Their calculations took into account the mass of the sleigh and its load of presents — but left out the mass of reindeer and Santa, which the authors said are “negligible.” 

It was assumed that Santa uses a 19th-century British naval sled weighing about 1400 pounds, modified with wings attached on either side from a Boeing 747.

The weight of the sleigh needs to be balanced by the lift — when air flows over a wing at a lower pressure than the air flowing under it.

In order to produce enough lift to fly during Santa’s Christmas Eve journey, the sleigh would have to move at about 10 times the speed of sound — 12,300 miles per hour.

Santa’s sleigh would need a pair of wings similar to those on a commercial airplane. It would also need an engine with an equivalent thrust to that produced by NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which was used for the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, the aspiring physicists argued.

“We have concluded that Santa’s jet engine must be extremely powerful and as a result he and the elves must have access to advanced technologies,” Ryan Rowe, one of the student authors of the paper, said.

“Santa must have had access to a new type of jet engine technology capable of replacing the effects of Christmas spirit.”

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