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Old 16th July 2008 | 08:24
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Dick Whittingham
 
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 461
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From: Bristol
Try this one:

How Airplanes Fly

Basically, to get lift you have to divert a mass of air downwards. Bernouilli illustrates the effect on pressure distribution caused by imparting downward momentum to the air by using airfoil shaped wings. It is a good, easy way to visualise a very complex reaction. It is not the complete truth.

There used to be an RAF question "what is the air doing after an aircraft has passed through?" The answer is " it is going down, because of lift, going forward because of drag and round and round because of the wing vortices"

But, I repeat, the essential element is that without a downward momentum shift of the airflow there can be no lift.

Dick
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