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Alexander Georgas schreef:
There is plenty of good understanding that can be gained by explanations that contain false premices. Should we be as purist as this to reject even a cursory mention of things that are not 100% accurate in the educational process? Being an aerospace student myself I`m probally a bit of a purist as well. Nevertheless I think that the final goal of teaching aerodynamics (anything actually) is understanding, not perfectionism. In the same principle, when trying to explain the very complex phenomenon of wing lift, do we go from stating the Bernulli effect and Newton's 2nd law to diferential equations of fluid dynamics -- or possibly stop there, explaining that the actual phenomenon is too complex for 'common people' to understand? What`s wrong about only telling the short version of the theory, without complicated stuff: "An airfoil creates an flow which accelerates air downwards. This results in a pressure (and shear) field on you`re wing which causes both lift and drag. Nothing really complicated about that I guess, and no problem with applying it to reality at all. I would like to know what this forum thinks in terms of this? In my experience, quite a few gliding instructors are either very much missinformed about the aerodynamics of lift (and keep on missinforming students), or offer explanations that while accurate fail to answer a student's question by advancing the understanding of what take places. This is very discouraging for most people and it is only the few who will then go back into the literature and try to sort things out. About a year ago I was having a discussion with a couple of gliding instructors. None of them understood "anything" about aerodynamics and I heard the weirdest theories. Nevertheless they seem to teach flying quite well without any problems for their student. Not understanding flow completely doesn`t seems to be such a problem in flying a glider. The funny thing about this is that, while it is not very important to know about aerodynamics to fly a glider, all sorts of misinformation eventually trickles into discussions and advice about such things as the best bank to turn in, or when a stall occurs etc. So what should we do about this? Just skip the complicated theory? Real world aerodynamics is extremely complicated with a lot of issues (especially vortices) still beyond oure understanding. You can`t expect every glider pilot to understand complex differential equations or the navier-stokes equations. Instead of putting a lot of effort in explaining lift we maybe should concentrate a bit more in the relationship of weight, surface and so on, which is very usefull in normal flight operations. The square and squareroot equations seems to be complicated enough for most pilots. Jarno Nieuwenhuize, The Netherlands. |
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