Is it too late to join in? I hope not...
When I was in high school I used to play with windshear effects by launching paper aeroplanes down the length of the bus just as it was about to accelerate or brake. The local mass of air changed speed with the bus - watch those paper planes fall out of the sky!
As to those getting confused by KE and momentum - no. It sounds plausible, but an aircraft does not "know" what its GS or Trk is. It only "knows" airspeed & heading. These change 100% aerodynamically - ie relative to the local airmass. Why should the aircraft attempt to conserve GS when turning downwind, when the equations governing flight make no reference to what might be happening 1000 feet away from the wings?
In general, momentum and kinetic energy theory does not concern itself with velocity relative to any "absolute" - ie groundspeed. The mathematics refer only to changes in velocity relative to the medium in which the object travels: the atmosphere in our case. For this reason, groundspeed is a total irrelevance to discussions of aircraft turning / banking / climbing / descending performance.
On a more empirical note, do orbits in a cloud, with a safety pilot flying & you just gazing intently at the ASI. Will it fluctuate? Only one way to find out...
O8