Why does an airplane stay in the air?

No one ever heeds my warnings... Why?


If you keep parsing this lift/flight problem; you will discover that man, like the bumblebee, cannot fly. The bee continues to do so, only because it cannot understand that it cannot fly.

Money is the best answer, and truest.

That and doubt/misunderstanding what is the cause.. we are, like the bee, too stupid to realize that it is simply, mathematically, physically impossible for us to fly.

So we keep doing it... Please, let sleeping dogs lie... The FAA is correct, whatever they say. Bernoulli/Newton or a combination... Or fairy dust... If the FAA says it... It is truth.
 
smv said:
Give me enough thrust and I can make anything fly.

There seems to be a groundswell of anti-Bernoulli schools of thought out there. Try goooogle "how is lift created" and most of them are giving 100% credit to Newton. Even NASA has turned on Bernoulli.

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/wrong1.html

:eek:
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Disproving a common misconception and misapplication of a theory is not turning on the theory.

From the website you cite, NASA states, "both "Bernoulli" and "Newton" are correct". Maybe read your source in it entirety instead of paraphrasing it incorrectly.
 
Brad Smith said:
Would a complete understanding of "lift" have helped the crew of Air France 447? Or would time have been better spent on learning to fly the airplane and recognize unusual attitudes and how to correct them? Not trying to berate the crew, just trying to focus on what is important to understand about flying and what is best left to discussion by fluid dynamics professors.
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One thing they were NOT doing was having this discussion about Newton and Bernoulli.

In my opinion the root cause of that accident was having three zombies in the cockpit trying to control an automated plane, reacting to an initial event and never processing the correct information once it returned to the instruments.
 
dbahn said:
In my opinion the root cause of that accident was having three zombies in the cockpit...
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That’s insulting, and inappropriate.

There’s no guarantee you, or any given pilot, could have saved that situation. Those with the least insight into the complexities of human psychology and performance are the most likely to see themselves immune from such limitations and to belittle others. Pride goeth before a fall.

Just sayin’.
 
FastEddieB said:
That’s insulting, and inappropriate.

Just sayin’.
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Perhaps, but that's my opinion anyway.

There's good evidence that all three crew members had very little sleep while they were in Rio De Janeiro, a popular destination as a party town for crew. (Some of those details were initially redacted from the accident report by the BEA, French version of NTSB, but were later released.) The captain told the other pilots that he had only one hour of sleep the night before (he had a mistress in Rio) and in fact had gone to sleep in the crew quarters when the problem began. When he was finally aroused from sleep and entered the cockpit all of the instruments were working normally, yet none of the then three crew members were able to figure out what was going on - and that all that was needed was to reduce the angle of attack. Fatigue can be deadly, can be the major cause of poor performance, and cannot be measured after an event like this.

Personally, I feel opposite from immune in this and many similar situations. No one is immune from the effects of fatigue, despite many claims to the contrary, and recognizing that fact is a major step in accident prevention.
 
dbahn said:
Fatigue can be deadly, can be the major cause of poor performance, and cannot be measured after an event like this.
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If by “zombies”, all you meant was they were overly fatigued, I accept that. It just struck me the wrong way. Bygones.

Personally, I feel opposite from immune in this and many similar situations. No one is immune from the effects of fatigue, despite many claims to the contrary, and recognizing that fact is a major step in accident prevention.
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Good.
 
FastEddieB said:
If by “zombies”, all you meant was they were overly fatigued, I accept that. It just struck me the wrong way. Bygones.
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Yes, that's the point.

We wonder how smart pilots make mistakes that seem to be "stupid", and the tendency is often to just assign stupidity as the root cause. That action supports your earlier point to what I consider "false immunity", i.e. "the pilot was stupid, I'm not stupid, therefore I can't make those mistakes". That's logical but based on false information - the pilot wasn't "stupid", and I like to believe that a truly stupid person would never get a Pilot Certificate in the first place.

I truly believe that many of the mistakes we see in aviation that seem hard to fathom have nothing to do with raw intelligence but rather have more to do with poor performance related to fatigue, hence the "zombie" concept. And we all are zombies from time to time. :eek:
 
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