Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it as a credible debunking of the popular but wrong explanations of how wings generate lift.
What it is
Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec theothermkn · 2019-06 · on “To Build a Better Teapot, Researchers Create Liquid Helix”
As an aside, when you're reading the article and you stumble across the link to a description of how lift works, do yourself a favor and skip it. Instead, check out [this video] . Almost no matter how sophisticated or simple your theory of lift is, it's almost certainly significantly at odds with observed physical phenomenon.
Recommends zkms · 2020-02 · on “The mysteries of aerodynamic lift”
Doug McLean (Boeing Technical Fellow) has a quite decent talk about the question of intuitive explanations for aerodynamic lift: [this video] Also Philippe Spalart's quote is right on the money: "It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist".
Recommends raverbashing · 2021-06 · on “Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight”
Yeah, the usual explanation of "air goes faster over the top because they have to meet at the end" is BS. Especially the 2nd part. A video about the subject [this video] But the explanation I can come up with is: lift is a force due to low-pressure regions caused by laminar flow over a surface. It is essentially "form drag" (caused not by the profile facing air directly but by the aft part) but the tricky part is that it is not directly parallel to the flow of air, but also depends on the orientation of the wing.
Recommends MaxBarraclough · 2021-06 · on “Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight”
You might get something out of this 2013 talk by former Boeing engineer Doug McLean on misconceptions about lift. [0] [0] [this video] (watch for 5 minutes to get some idea of his main points, or 35 minutes to watch in full. The link will skip the introduction.)