"Neil Gould" wrote in message
.. .
This makes *no* reference to the amount of lift that a stalled wing
provides beyond it being inadequate to support flight,

Interestingly enough, a stall occurs at the critical angle of attack, which
is the AOA at which the coefficient of lift is the *maximum possible*. Just
past the critical angle of attack (that is, further into the stall), the
lift coefficient is no longer maximal, but is still well above what it is in
ordinary cruise flight.

What *does* happen just past the critical AOA--that is, just into the
stall--is *not* that there's insufficient lift to support the plane's
weight, but rather that there's a loss of *vertical damping*. John Denker (a
physicist and a pilot) has a nice explanation he
http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/vdamp.ht...rtical-damping.

Wrong. "To be a scalar" it needs to be a single value. And it is.
Angle-of-attack is just an angle. A single value.

Wrong. A scalar can not contain elements of direction by definition. Ergo,
AOA has no meaning as a scalar.

No, an angle is unquestionably a scalar, not a vector. Check any
introductory math text. If an angle were a vector, then a symbol
representing an angle would be set in boldface; but it is not.

You're right that an angle is defined by reference to vectors, but so is
(for example) the *dot product* of two vectors (yet the dot product is a
scalar); or so is the *magnitude* of a vector (but the magnitude is a
scalar). So being defined by reference to vectors does not preclude a
quantity from being scalar.

--Gary