Santa Claus needs more than his reindeer to fly.
A new study published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics claims that Santa’s sleigh could actually fly with some major advancements — similar to those of NASA’s Saturn V rocket.
Physics students at the University of Leicester were inspired by the scene in the 2003 movie “Elf” where Santa relies on a jet engine to power his sleigh.
The students wanted to create a simple model that addressed the issues that kept a sleigh from flying.
They calculated based on the mass of the sleigh and the mass 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 that weighs about 1400 pounds (635 kg), 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 used for the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, or 150 Boeing 747-400 liners, physicists said.
“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.”