Airplane Pilot's As Physicists

On 9 Oct, 21:08, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
Hi All,

There is a long discussion ongoing in rec.aviation.piloting about what
causes lift on a plane. You can read from the link below. Please
note that about 80% of the post are mostly ad hominem attacks and
should be ignored. There are some small bits of real discussion.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.a...owse_frm/threa...

I am an electrical engineer with experience in analag design and
software, with math and physics background that you would expect of an
electrical engineer.

There are many points made in the discussion, but I would like to
focus on one in particular for the sake of progress.

There are people in the pilot's group, who think that lift on a wing
is analyzed as such:

1. There is air on outside of top of wing that is pushing down, but
reduced because of aerodynamics.
2. The *inside* of the wing contains air pushing up against the
underside of top of wing .
3. Let us ignore that the same air inside the wing pushes down on the
overside of bottom part of wing.
3. The difference in pressure against the underside of the top wing on
the inside of wing and top of wing on outside, is what gives plane
lift.

Note that they ignore the pressure inside the wing that pushes
downward on the wing.

I am trying to convince them that, if there is air on the inside of
the wing, it pushes against all sides of the inside of the wing,
including both top underside and bottom overside, and thereby
nullifying any effect it would have on the wing. Lift is caused by a
difference in pressure between the underside of the bottom of the
wing, and the overside of the top of the wing.

I count 8-9 people in the group who are utterly convinced that I am
inept at physics, mathematics, etc.

Note that some of these people have been flying aircraft for years,
even decades, while I am still a student pilot.

Comments from anyone who knows physics welcome.

-Le Chaud Lapin-


You may want to check out my web pages http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/bernoulli.htm
and http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/drag.htm for a closer examination
of the physics behind the aerodynamic lift and drag.

The main point I am making there is that it is physically nonsense to
claim that changing merely the tangential velocity of the air stream
relative to the surface would in any way produce a resultant force (at
least for a non-viscous gas). What one needs for a pressure change
(and thus a force) on the surface is a change in the numbers and/or
the velocity of the molecules hitting it, i.e. it is only the vertical
component of the velocity that is relevant here. Only this can produce
the lift for an airfoil, either because of the increased number of
collisions on the lower side or the decreased number of collisions on
the upper side (both situations lead to a lift). And it should be
obvious that for this to be the case, one must either have the lower
side of the wing facing to a certain degree into the airstream, and/or
the upper side facing to a certain degree opposite to the airstream.
This is why one either needs a certain 'angle of attack' or a
correspondingly shaped airfoil. And it should be obvious that in order
to have an asymmetric force (i.e. a higher upward than downward force)
one needs the surfaces of the airfoil to be orientated in some way
asymmetrical relatively to the airstream. So a perfectly symmetrical
airfoil (front to back) at a zero angle of attack (like I indicated in
Fig.1 on my page http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/bernoulli.htm ) should
not produce any lift as the upward force (from the rear part) is
exactly equal to the downward force (from the front part). All that
would happen is that the wing experiences an anti-clockwise torque.
This is the reason why the rear part of the wing (behind the apex)
must always have a larger surface than the front part. At least I have
yet to see an airfoil where this is not the case and where it can be
used at a zero angle of attack.
(the Bernoulli principle is in direct contradiction to this as it
would also predict a lift for a perfectly symmetric airfoil in this
sense).

Thomas