I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I’ve seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just… Soars… Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf… It’s crazy. With how much these things weigh, it’s insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we’re flying now. Like wow… Dude crazy.

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Yeah that’s mostly bullshit.

    Your arm flies when you stick it out a window, and it isn’t shaped like shit, so does a piece of paper.

    It’s basically like a sail, but horizontally instead of vertically, the onrushing air hits the bottom at an angle, is deflected down, and bumps the wing up.

    The rest is just to try to reduce drag on the top (super-critical wings attempting to maximize laminar flow, or at least make the disconnection as far back as possible so turbulence creates the least drag on the wing.

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      6 days ago

      I’m partial to the Newtonian explanation myself, I was explaining my interest the first time I saw an illustration of the Bernoulli principle.

      in fact, I just wrote about The Newtonian explanation a few minutes ago:

      "the Newtonian makes more practical end complete sense to me sense to me as an explanation for a lift.

      maybe the confusion comes from calling the motion of pushing air down “lift”

      push-off.

      hm. what the heck is an appropriate antonym for lift…

      spring-hold.

      oh, buoyancy?

      maybe we should switch our talk from lift to buoyancy.

      rather than generating lift, velocity through the air generates aerodynamic buoyancy due to the increase in downward pressure, or rather the compressed air beneath the airfoil."

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        Sorry, as an engineer, this whole “shape of a birds wing makes air move faster over it” pisses me off to no end.

        Airfoils are shaped the way they are for drag purposes, not whatever crazy things they say, we could make them like massive triangles and they would still work.

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          6 days ago

          sure, i get it.

          he did come up with that half explanation 250 what years ago, so I’ll give him a pass.

          kind of a bummer that a half explanation is his most famous 'discovery" even though he did so much

          • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            6 days ago

            No, yeah, Bernoulli was a genius who did a lot otherwise, he should be remembered for all his other scientific contributions…

            But you fuck one goat…