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Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics

Michigan Engineering · 856.8K views · 2013-10-21 · 48:26

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as a credible debunking of the popular but wrong explanations of how wings generate lift.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2021

Topics

Aviation & aerospace engineeringEveryday physics & science demosFundamental physics
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aerodynamicsliftphysics misconceptionsboeingfluid dynamics

What people said

theothermkn · 2019-06 · Strong recommendation

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 [VIDEO] . Almost no matter how sophisticated or simple your theory of lift is, it's almost certainly significantly at odds with observed physical phenomenon.

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raverbashing · 2021-06 · Recommendation

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 [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.

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MaxBarraclough · 2021-06 · Recommendation

You might get something out of this 2013 talk by former Boeing engineer Doug McLean on misconceptions about lift. [0] [0] [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.)

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Sources

Video by Michigan Engineering, played through YouTube.

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