this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Wait until you find out that probably wrong.
Its what we assumed for the last 100 odd years, but apparently in the last few we discovered they don't actually work like that.
oh, go on.
i haven't heard of the updated dynamics of flight.
I don't know why everybody focuses so much on the top of the wing. Relative to ambient air, the pressure above the wing is slightly reduced, but the pressure below the wing is massively increased. That massive increase is far more important than the slight reduction above.
We know this, because simple, flat airfoils are capable of flight. Think: paper airplanes, simple balsa models, etc.
The shape of the airfoil is not actually very important for lift. You can make a brick produce plenty enough lift to maintain its altitude, if you can provide sufficient thrust and control it's attitude.
The specific shape of the airfoil is primarily important for minimizing drag across a variety of speeds and angles of attack at various loadings. This is where the top surface of the wing becomes important. By maintaining the flow over the wing, drag is reduced, and controllability is maintained.
yeah, I'm with you, the Newtonian makes more practical end complete sense to me sense to me as an explanation for a lift.
maybe the confusion comes from calling the motion of pushing air down "lift"
push-off.
hm. what the heck is an appropriate antonym for lift...
spring-hold.
oh, buoyancy?
maybe we should switch our talk from lift to buoyancy.
rather than generating lift, velocity through the air generates aerodynamic buoyancy due to the increase in downward pressure, or rather the compressed air beneath the airfoil.
This article does a pretty nice job of describing all the different theories
That's a great article, thanks for the read.
I just want to tell the void that I arrived at a similar conclusion about induced high and low pressure zones based on the wing "slicing" the air in half as if it was a continuous material causing cavitation above the wing, and was mocked for it.
thanks, that's a good article.
I don't know the full story, only that the fact air particles have to speed up over the top so they match up at the end is incorrect - one at the top, one at the bottom don't actually arrive at the end at the same time. There is something missing.
This is wrong. Lift is generated from pressure difference. This pressure difference is caused by air moving faster over the top of the wing. I have no idea what you're talking about with air particles matching up at the end.
I vaguely remember seeing a video that explained that how it's usually explained is wrong. That's what they're probably referring to. But it wasn't that we don't actually know how it works, just that the common simplification is not technically correct (which happens often with these things).