this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I remember reading a couple years ago that's not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is "close enough" and "seems right", and it really doesn't matter unless you're a plane wing designer.
The false thing they teach is that air has to go over the longer side faster. Actually, it's under no obligation to meet back with the same air on the other side, and doesn't in practice. The real magic bit is the corner on the back, which is not aerodynamic and "forces" air to move parallel to it (eventually, as the starting vortex dissipates).
The pressure difference from different volumetric flow speeds is real, it's just not that straightforward to produce, because air mostly does whatever it wants. A lot of aerodynamics is still more art than science, and it's even possible the Navier-Stokes equations it's based on fail under certain conditions.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
"With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly."