On Oct 15, 7:54 pm, "Androcles" wrote:
"Le Chaud Lapin" wrote in ooglegroups.com...
: On Oct 15, 6:42 pm, "Gatt" wrote:
: "Le Chaud Lapin" wrote in
oglegroups.com...
:
: I read last night in another piloting book, again, that the common
belief
: about the dynamics of airfoils is wrong,
:
: Yeah? Which one?
:
: I'd have to go back to bookstore to find the name.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Or back to sleep to dream again...

Barry Schiff, in "The Proficient Pilot", "An AOPA Book", writes on
page 2:

"There is, for example, this amusing fable: "Air flowing above the
wing has a greater distance to travel (because of camber) than air
flowing beneath the wing. Therefore, air above the wing must travel
faster so as to arrive at the wing's trailing edge at the same time as
air flowing underneath. This is pure nonsense."

He goes on to write:

"Pilot's are generally curious, intelligent breaed who desire to learn
as much as possible about the science of flight. This seprates them
from most automobile drivers who don't konw and couldn't care less
about the different between a distributor and a differential."

This last paragraph sounds reasonable, except for the fact that all
but 3 or 4 of the pilots that I "met" in rec.piloting.aviation did not
seem to fit this characterization. Even though there is undeniable
evidence both in print and on the WWW that there is not conscensus
about the dynamics of lift, there is been vehement rejection by almost
all (except the 3-4 mentioned) to broach the topic.

He then writes:

"Pilots use lift; their lives depend on it. They read and talk about
it, are quizzed about it, and even try explaining this miracle of
flight to their lay friends. The problem is that most pilots really
don't know how lift is created; they only think they do."

Hmmm...

Before I started reading his book, I had the idea (don't ask me what
possessed me to make such an assumption) that most pilots understood
the dynamics of flight. I did have personal experiences before taking
ground school that made me almost sure that the pilots that I had
spoken with personally did not understand the physics (not really),
but I thought this was due to my own bad luck. Then after ground
school and reading the Jeppesen description of lift, the NASA site,
the sites at some aero/astro departments in the USA, books at the
bookstore, and especially after my brief visit to
rec.aviation.piloting, I am inclined to believe what Barry Schiff
wrote above.

Also, if the pilots in rec.aviation.piloting really understood the
dynamics of lift, they might not have responded so vitriollically to
my original post. At the very least, there would have been open
discussion without personal attacks.

Furthermore, I have visited 4 or 5 other sites tonight about the
theory of lift, and each of them said the same thing: "the other
writers think they know, but they don't." In fact, while writing this
very post, I noticed a Google ad in the right column entitled "A
Physical Description of Lift" Here is what is written in the first
paragraph:

"Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple
question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets
is misleading and often just plain wrong."
(http://groups.google.com/group/sci.p...se_frm/thread/
f0ee729cabbcb903/#)

I cannot see how much clearer it could be. More than 90% of every
description of lift I have seen in print and on the WWW have all said
basically the same thing: "other people got it wrong."

Not everyone can be right when each of them are saying that some of
the others are wrong.

Therefore, one could conclude that the vitriolic attacks against me
personally for broaching the subject might be a sign of something
deeper, perhaps the attackers' distaste for having the topic openly
discussed.

And yet still, after my 1st post, after more than 600 replies
cummulative, not one pilot has dared answered the question why the
bottom paper rises.

Perhaps I will re-post the experiment in sci.physics to see what the
physicists think.

-Le Chaud Lapin-