airplanes fly by pushing air down

[nibot]

»The main fact of all heaver-than-air flight is this: the wing keeps the airplane up by pushing the air down.

It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important. But the really important thing to understand is that the wing, in whatever fashion, makes the air go down. In exerting a downward force upon the air, the wing receives an upward counterforce--by the same principle, known as Newton's law of action and reaction, which makes a gun recoil as it shoves the bullet out forward; and which makes the nozzle of a fire hose press backward heavily against the fireman as it shoots out a stream of water forward. Air is heavy; sea-level air weights about 2 pounds per cubic yard; thus, as your wings give a downward push to a cubic yard after cubic yard of that heavy stuff, they get upward reactions that are equally hefty.

That's what keeps an airplane up. Newton's law says that, if the wing pushes the air down, the air must push the wing up. It also puts the same thing the other way 'round: if the wing is to hold the airplane up in the fluid, ever-yielding air, it can do so only by pushing the air down. All the fancy physics of Bernoulli's Theorem, all the highbrow math of the circulation theory, all the diagrams showing the airflow on a wing--all that is only an elaboration and more detailed description of just how Newton's law fulfills itself--for instance, the rather interesting but (for the pilot) really quite useless observation that the wing does most of its downwashing work by suction, with its top surface. ...

Thus, if you will forget some of this excessive erudition, a wing becomes much easier to understand; it is in the last analysis nothing but an air deflector. It is an inclined plane, cleverly curved, to be sure, and elaborately streamlined, but still essentially an inclined plane. That's, after all, why that whole fascinating contraption of ours is called an air-plane.«

[Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche, page 9, published 1944]

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

awesome :)

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I wish there were more common sense explanations for stuff. Maybe people would be more interested in science and engineering if they didn't have to learn all the jargon.

I remember the first time I asked someone what keeps an airplane up, and they said it had something to do with Bernoulli's principle and the curvature of the wing. But later I found out that's not really true. There are planes that have entirely flat wings, and even the ones that are curved still mostly function due to the angle of inclination. The only point of curving the top of the wing is so that you can get a little extra lift... and in particular, so that if the wing is at zero inclination there is a slight positive lift.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

In school I learned the "equal transit time" story about how wings work.

In fact, I learned many wrong things in school.

- astronauts are weightless because they're far away

- there's a high tide on the far side of the earth because the earth 'shields' the gravity

...

[joneshead.livejournal.com]

thats witchcraft.