S1_ 6 The Wings Of Christmas

Abstract

According to traditional lore, each Christmas Santa Claus travels across the globe delivering gifts to all of the children on his ‘Nice’ list. In this paper, we calculated the velocity he would travel at to be 1.56×106 ms−1. Thus, if his sleigh had aerofoils they would require a minimum surface area of 1.26×10−3 m2 each to provide lift.