Le Chaud Lapin writes:

Well, someone should have told me that Rob Machado and Barry Schiff
are not experts.

It's best not to worry too much about credentials or hearsay.

Then we
have Jeppesen, a leaders in edcuation of GA. You would think that,
with such a fine product (no sarcasm meant), that they would have
people whom they trust, experts, at the very high-end of academia, who
could verify what's in the text. But what is in my Jeppensen book and
what Barry Schiff wrote is wrong.

Jeppesen probably depends on credentials, like so many other entities and
people. It's easier to go by credentials than to test actual qualifications.
If someone has fancy credentials, he may get the job, even if he doesn't
actually know the answers.

Now I could have gone to some university in the U.S., Germany, France,
and found someone with stratospheric credentials in aero-astro, but
after seeing one expert say that the other is wrong, and then seeing
an incorrect application of Newton's law (yes I still believe it's
incorrect), I had to put on the brakes.

Lift is bizarre because it's easy to use and very reliable and practical, and
the overall principle is easy to understand correctly, but it's very difficult
to analyze in detail. But that is true of many things in the physical world:
the more closely you look at them, the more confusing they become.

In any field of research, there is mind and hand. For artists in the
field, there are those who have a proclivity to use hand more than
mind, and there are those who have a proclivity to use mind more than
hand. In any case, there are typically multiple paths to discovery,
one major path relying heavily on the imagination, the other path
relying on experimentation. Typically there is a combination. Based
on the small amount of the field of aerodynamcis I have seen so far,
and the disputes and inconsistencies, I would not be surprised if
there is an enormous amount of money being spent on experimentation.
Granted, experimentation is very necessary to validate (or invalidate)
what was conceived, but in many fields, there are researchers who
adopt the brute force approach, not completely, but much more than
someone who, lacking $100's of millions in funding would.

Not understanding aerodynamics doesn't prevent you from developing elaborate
computer models, it just prevents you from developing models that produce
accurate answers. Just running something through a computer doesn't validate
it.

A lot of J. D. Anderson.

Everyone has his favorite "experts."

I guess the most important thing I learned from this experiences is
that, if it is true that the field of aerodynamics is fully-cooked,
the experts need to tell everyone else so that they stop printing (as
late as 2006) erroneous information in textbooks about the very
basics.

There are still many mysteries in aerodynamics, as in so many other areas of
physical reality. It seems unlikely that human beings could have gone for
thousands of years understanding almost nothing of the subject and then
suddenly could have progressed to omniscience in a single century.