Einstein's aerofoil made me chuckle - i'd never heard about that one...
From this site
Incidentally, during the first world war when Albert Einstein was a professor in Berlin he wrote a paper in which he offered an explanation of aerodynamic lift. (This was in 1916, shortly after he completed the general theory of relativity.) He began “Where does the lift come from that allows airplanes and birds to fly?”, and went on to say he could not find even the most primitive answer in the published literature – which shows how little acquainted he was with the literature. In any case, Einstein decided the explanation for lift was the Bernoulli effect, and he sent a detailed proposal to a German aircraft company for a “humped wing, shaped like a cat’s back” which, he asserted, would provide maximum lift with minimum drag. As part of the effort to develop improved weapons for the German war effort, the company (Luftverkehrsgesellschaft, or LVG) actually constructed a prototype, which was flight tested by Paul Georg Erhardt, one of the pioneers of German aviation and head of the experimental department of LVG. Alas, the plane was a fiasco, barely able to get off the ground, and Erhardt considered himself lucky to have survived the test. Years later Einstein recalled the incident in a letter to Erhardt, saying “that is what can happen to a man who thinks a lot but reads little”.
Well, i found studying aerodynamic maths harder than special rel (but general rel is definately harder still). So, perhaps that little oversight should just be seen as a demonstration of his interest in the field of aeronautics.
Mart