Alan Baker wrote:
...and the plane pulls up on the earth.

The air pushes up on the plane and the plane pushes down on the air;
essentially transferring the earth's continuous flow of downward
momentum acting on the plane to a much greater mass of air.

That air keeps that downward momentum, diffusing it through more and
more volume...

...until it eventually transfers it back to the Earth; countering the
aircraft's upward pull on it.

I'm willing to send that to any Ph.D. in Aeronautics that anyone cares
to name and post the answer back here.

Anyone game?

Send that to Scott Eberhardt.

http://home.comcast.net/~clipper-108/Professional.html
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Next, don't miss "A slightly more technical paper, which targets physics
students and teachers, titled The Newtonian Description of Lift of a
Wing, is also available online (in PDF format)" at the bottom of the
webpage. You'll notice his email address at the top of that paper, the
same as on the webpage.

As the paper says, the amount of air below that is pushed is negligible.
See "the wrong-Newtonian description of lift" on page 3.

See the "virtual scoop" in Figure 5. Air from overhead is pulled down by
the plane. The plane must, in turn, be pulled up. You imagined a plane
at the top of an air column, pushing down. It's more like a plane at the
bottom of a suction bubble, pulling down. Oh, you like differential
pressure, you don't like air to pull? Too bad, he talks about air
pulling on page 5.

Nothing is said about downwash continuing to the surface. The paper does
say that if a plane flies over a large scale, the weight of the airplane
would be measured. Excited?
Well, an acoustically levitated scale would register its own weight too.
Or turn that upside down, and the scale sees the earth's weight
acoustically levitated above the scale. Same thing, and no upwash or
downwash in sight, just a standing pressure wave with a scale caught at
a node between positive and negative.
Almost sort of like a wing between a strong little suction bubble and a
big weak pressure bubble. Is the wing almost sort of caught in a
standing wave? I don't know.