Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics

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.)

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.

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".

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.