this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can't push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It's like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I'm at 10,000 feet.
Tbf, you can make anything fly if you give it enough thrust. Wings just make it easier.
In a sense, everything can fly. Just sometimes not for very long.
Except bees. Engineers reckon they shouldnโt be able to fly, but bees told them to get fucked and do it anyway
Engineers never really claimed that. Motivational speakers did.
Scientists admitted that their models don't show how bumblebees can generate enough lift to fly. By now, they've improved their models, taking into account that at an insect's scale, air behaves much more like water. It "appears" to be thicker because the air molecules are larger in relation to an insect than to a human.
Also, complicated turbulence stuff.
https://i.imgur.com/lDSBuud.gif
BEHOLD THE CUBE PLANE
You joke, but lemme introduce you to Tacit Blue:
Yes, this thing did actually fly.
Stealth demonstator aircraft from the early 80s.
Like someone flipped a bathtub over and made it fly.
How do we stop radar? By obliterating the air around us with cube. Lol
That is actually pretty neat though!
https://theinfosphere.org/images/a/a4/New_Planet_Express_Ship.png
I remember reading a couple years ago that's not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is "close enough" and "seems right", and it really doesn't matter unless you're a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
"With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly."
The false thing they teach is that air has to go over the longer side faster. Actually, it's under no obligation to meet back with the same air on the other side, and doesn't in practice. The real magic bit is the corner on the back, which is not aerodynamic and "forces" air to move parallel to it (eventually, as the starting vortex dissipates).
The pressure difference from different volumetric flow speeds is real, it's just not that straightforward to produce, because air mostly does whatever it wants. A lot of aerodynamics is still more art than science, and it's even possible the Navier-Stokes equations it's based on fail under certain conditions.
Yes, this is what I was thinking of, thanks for filling us in.
I mean, it's not something for nothing. You still get drag at least matching lift to conserve energy.