The physics of flight: I. Fixed and rotating wings

摘要

Almost all elementary textbook explanations of the theory of flight rely heavily on Bernoulli's principle and the fact that air travels faster over a wing than below it. In recent years the inadequacies and, indeed, fallacies in this explanation have been exposed (see Babinsky's excellent article in 2003 Phys. Educ. 38 497–503) and it is now appreciated that it is possible to provide a much simpler explanation in terms of Newton's laws. In this article it is shown how a couple of plausible assumptions are all that is needed to calculate a lot of interesting facts about wings.