I suspect if you made a wing out of a flat piece of material, tilted at the appropriate angle of attack, it would be sufficient to fly a plane. It just wouldn't be optimized at all.
Really, you need full Navier-Stokes behavior to explain all the forces acting on the wing. Bernoulli doesn't generalize to a full vector field, it's a simplified version of Navier-Stokes. Calling in the big guns doesn't make for an easy discussion.
(mechanical engineer, I figure I had like 1/3 of the fluids classes the real aerospace guys get).
> I suspect if you made a wing out of a flat piece of material, tilted at the appropriate angle of attack, it would be sufficient to fly a plane.
You don't have to suspect. Many aerobatic aircraft (not to mention many high performance military aircraft) have wings that are symmetrical top to bottom (they aren't exactly flat but the top-bottom symmetry is enough to prove the point). They still fly. (The article mentions this.)
When you were a kid, did you not ever put your hand out the window on the freeway? You can actually feel the pressure differential lifting your hand up once you get the right angle.
Same, intuitive way I think of it since learning the school and pop-culture explanations are basically wrong—and for reasons that are unclear to me, because why make up some unintuitive BS when the intuitive and obvious explanation is closer to correct.
Stick hand out window, tilt hand, feel wind push hand up. Wind hits bottom of hand, pushes it up. That's the main thing, and everyone already gets that if they've ever, like, experienced wind. Play with it a little and you can feel your hand respond a bit differently based on the kind of "shadow" it's casting in the wind. That's the rest of it, more or less. There, airplanes explained, certainly way better and closer to correct than "well you see the top of the wing is longer than the bottom, so Bernoulli's principle is the reason airplanes can fly..."
Certainly not optimized but also I think the very definition of a stall.
Ground school was ages ago for me but I do recall a bit of it. I thought the laminar flow on the top was vital for lift even a slight ripple was bad. A flat wing top and bottom would not create lift or poor lift. Well at least for aircraft with flaps and aelerons that need consistent airflow to maintain control.
The difference in the bottom flat part of an aircraft wing compared to the curved top part is what creates the difference in velocity; faster bottom, slower top which creating lift. But again maybe not necessary if you are not in an aircraft that needs to be controlled.
The ramblings of a former private pilot student, but an eternal fan of physics.
Really, you need full Navier-Stokes behavior to explain all the forces acting on the wing. Bernoulli doesn't generalize to a full vector field, it's a simplified version of Navier-Stokes. Calling in the big guns doesn't make for an easy discussion.
(mechanical engineer, I figure I had like 1/3 of the fluids classes the real aerospace guys get).