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Twelve short answers about flight, aircraft and airports, every figure sourced to the body that publishes it.

A wing holds an aircraft up by turning the air that flows past it. You'll see that explained two different ways, and NASA's position is that both are right.

The band jet airliners cruise in runs from flight level 290 to flight level 410, roughly 29,000 to 41,000 feet. That's a regulated figure rather than a rule of thumb.

NASA's own figure for today's larger airliners is roughly 600 mph, which it puts at about 80 per cent of the speed of sound.

A knot is one nautical mile per hour, and the international nautical mile is exactly 1,852 metres. Both figures are fixed by agreement, not by measurement.

Turbulence is rough, irregular air that an aircraft happens to be flying through. It's a property of the atmosphere, not a fault with the aeroplane.

The families that matter are set out in regulation, and they're divided by one thing: where the lift comes from.

The cockpit, called the flight deck on larger aircraft, is the compartment at the front where the flight crew sit and fly the thing.

You'll find three confident answers to this everywhere: heat, inspection and resale. We went looking for a regulator or a manufacturer that publishes any of them, and came back with nothing.

They're contrails, short for condensation trails, and NOAA's description is about as plain as it gets: they form when water vapour from an aircraft's exhaust condenses and freezes into…

A runway is the paved strip an aircraft takes off from and lands on. The number painted at the end of it is not a name. It's a bearing.

Most airports carry two codes, not one. A three-letter code for the commercial side of aviation, and a four-letter code for the operational side.

Plane spotting is watching, photographing and identifying aircraft, usually from public ground near an airport or under a flight path.

One photograph of one particular aircraft, and everything that can honestly be done with it.

There are six aircraft art styles to choose from when you upload a photo: keep it as a clean photo, or restyle it into a blueprint, a vintage travel poster, a line drawing, a watercolour…

Most of your spotting photos are for you: the logbook in pictures. But every so often you get one that stops you, and that's the one that belongs on a wall. The gap between a snapshot…

The short version: pick your sharpest, best-lit shot of the aircraft, upload it, then either print it true to life or have the AI redraw it as a blueprint, poster, line drawing or…

Who it is for, and what actually lands. One page per recipient, each making only the argument that is its own.

The useful sorting for aviation gifts is not by price or by product. It is by how much you know about this person's flying, because that decides everything else.

Paper, frame, canvas, metal or a mug. What each format physically is, and which one suits the picture you have.

For plane spotters, pilots and aviation fans: how to turn your own plane photos into wall art, get a print-worthy shot, and choose the right gift.

I run The Aviation Gift Co., a UK studio that makes personalised aviation gifts to order. Nothing is warehoused: a piece is printed after somebody buys it. The brand exists because…

Twelve short answers to the things people look up after something goes over. Every number here names the body that publishes it.