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The continued assertion that "we don't understand heavier-than-air flight" is a weird one. The article even skates around this, saying (essentially) "well maybe
by Cogito 5y ago
The continued assertion that "we don't understand heavier-than-air flight" is a weird one. The article even skates around this, saying (essentially) "well maybe we do understand it, but chaos theory!"
If you're in the sky and you want to stay there, you have to counteract gravity. Heavier-than-air flight does this by pushing down on air. Want to stay in the sky? Push down on enough air, fast enough, and you will stay in the sky.
Since air is a fluid, pushing down on air is equivalent to pushing air down. The lift a plane or helicopter generates is directly proportional to the amount of air it pushes down (and to a varying degree how much engine exhaust it pushes down). That is, we need something to divert air downwards and something to push us through that air. The better we can redirect air downwards, and push ourselves through the air, the easier it is to fly.
We have found many shapes that are very good at passively redirecting air when pushed through the air, we have developed engines that are good at pushing us through the air, and we have developed structures that are able to hold everything together while being light. That is why heavier-than-air flight is possible, and it's very well understood.
If anything, our understanding of why certain shapes redirect air so well is lacking, but even then not really. Experiments and modelling are really good at finding the conditions under which air stops being redirected efficiently. If we try to parameterise this airflow, and reduce it to simple equations, well maybe then the effect is not well explained. Statements like "the air moves faster on the top than on the bottom, so there is a pressure differential and hence a lifting force" may be true even if misleading, and statements like "the air moves faster on top because it is longer than the bottom side" are definitely misleading and incorrect, but just because these statements exist and some people believe them does not mean we don't understand heavier-than-air flight! Such flight is possible because we are able to push down on air with enough force to keep us flying, and so much of how that works is well understood.
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To try and say something directed more at the point the article seems to be making: confusion or misunderstanding about the technical details, or modelling, of something is very different to not understanding how that thing works.
We understand heavier-than-air flight in the exact same way we understand sailing - redirect airflow to generate a force for your own purpose - but you don't see articles about how we don't understand how sailing works.
- armada651 5y ago"We know how heavier-than-air flight works, but I want to be pedantic and nerd about some physics" That title doesn't get quite as many clicks unfortunately.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- carl_dr 5y agoI think the various discussions in these comments show that we don’t realllllly know, just that we understand what forces are there to allow it, and how to generate them.
- zazen 5y agoDifferent values of "we" going on here. "We" know how heavier-than-air flight works in the sense that it is known to science. "We" in the comments don't know, because most of us here have at most a Bachelor's in physics, and it takes more than that to really grok aerodynamics, but everyone (including me) can't resist the temptation to show off what partial knowledge they have from that undergrad fluid dynamics class. The fact that the second "we" doesn't really know aerodynamics, and is going to waste man-days chasing its own half-understandings round in circles in the comments, doesn't contradict that fact that the first "we" does understand aerodynamics. Planes aren't staying in the sky by accident, nor even just by the survivorship of trial-and-error engineering.
- parineum 5y agoKnowing Newtonian physics doesn't mean we understand all things that move. The point about "not understanding" flight is that, if we truly understood it, we could design the optimal aircraft from first principles before it ever entered a wind tunnel. Instead, we work based on incrementally improving tribal knowledge of what has worked in the past and try to make something similar to fit our desired flight envelope. Compared to something like rocket science where the entire craft can be built on a computer and we'll know exactly how much cargo we can get to the moon without even turning a single screw, we don't understand flight.