Neither Bernoulli nor Newton completely explain how airfoils work and lift is created. It's actually a highly complex enterprise we don't fully understand.
These two F-16s from the U.S. Air Force's Thunderbirds demonstration team illustrate one of the problems with Bernoulli's principle when explaining lift production: How does the inverted wing - and the airplane to which it's attached - stay aloft?
A popular misconception is that the Wright brothers, in addition to all of their other achievements, invented the airfoil. They didn’t. Sir John Cayley, an English engineer who also first identified the four forces of flight—lift, drag, thrust and weight—developed the cambered airfoil through detailed experimentation. His three-part work, On Aerial Navigation, published in 1809 and […]
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