That is correct. (In net, anyway.)

 

Doh!

 

Actually, I gotta admit, at first I was annoyed, but now this is really interesting. Could be some learning going on.

 

I also have to admit that my first response (quoting Pope) was a tad bit provocative.... It's just that airplanes are more or less my entire professional life, and I get irritated when people repeat these really common myths about them.

 

Damn I vaguely remember discussions of circulation around an airfoil from back in the day. I'm gonna have to go read Yogi's link and/or dredge out some textbooks. As for the streamlines pointing down, I bet the idealized image in my head is idealized to the point of being inviscid, at which point there is no vorticity. Wait, that's not right either, is it? Crap, I don't have time to get this all straightened out in my head right now .

 

Sounds to me that you are creating a vacuum of sorts above the wings and starting to compress air under the wing once the wing passes that space the compressed air would rush to fill that vacuum so if the reaction time of the compression was slower than the speed of the plane moving forward before the force is felt on the surface of the earth (if high enough) you would see that air move back up into the vacuum thus not getting any force reaching the ground?

 

Yogi's link is quite good. But it doesn't really cover the "circulation" explanation. It just says, "this is the one the aero engineers use"....

There can be vorticity in an inviscid fluid. The problem is that it can't start or stop, so how did it get there? The invention of the concept of a boundary layer was a way to get around such problems. You can treat *most* of the flow as inviscid and irrotational, and then account for all the messiness in a separate region.

in the days before computers, the real equations for fluid flow were just too complicated to solve, but the simplifications like considering the flow to be inviscid, incompressible, and/or irrotational made it possible to describe most of the flow pretty well.

 

Huh?

Look, bottom line is that lift is not magic. I suggest you read that link Yogi supplied. It's quite a good explanation in terms of understandable, non-mathematical physics.

 

It is when I do it.

(We call it "levitation" though, not "lift", because it sounds more mysterious, or at least more erudite.)

 

Do you wiggle your fingers?

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