Scientist debunks the explanation of flight

 

Steve Connor
Wednesday 25 January 2012 11:00 GMT
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Jets of smoke show that air moves faster over the top surface of a wing due to changes in pressure
Jets of smoke show that air moves faster over the top surface of a wing due to changes in pressure

The classic explanation of how a wing generates enough lift to keep a plane or a bird in the air is wrong, according to a Cambridge University physicist who cites a one minute video as proof.

Many textbooks and aircraft manuals say that a wing produces lift because air travelling over the curved topside of a wing has to travel further than wind flowing around the flat underside and so has to travel faster to keep up, generating lift.

But this standard explanation of lift has been shown to be wrong by a simple experiment where a wing is placed in an air tunnel with jets of smoke flowing over the upper and lower surfaces, said Professor Holger Babinsky.

"A wing lifts when the air pressure above it is lowered. It's often said that this happens because the airflow moving over the top, curved surface has a longer distance to travel and needs to go faster to have the same transit time as the air travelling along the lower, flat surface," Professor Babinsky said.

A slow-motion video of the wind-tunnel experiment carried out at Cambridge shows that air does indeed move faster over the upper, curved surface of a wing but this is because of the curvature of the upper surface. The air does not move faster in order to "catch up" with the air moving over the relatively shorter distance of the lower wing surface, Professor Babinsky said.

The video shows that the air moving over the upper surface of the wing travels further in the same amount of time than wind flowing past the lower surface. In other words there is no "equal transit time" between the upper and lower surfaces, as demanded by the classic explanation of lift.

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