Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: misconceptions (physics of flight)



Another long line; this one fro another sender. But no
HTML this time. Is it because John was responding to
a message from Lee which also had a long line? Did others
observed the same or it is my problem. If so so then can it
be fixed? What follows was a single line. The intention was
to produce a paragraph, I suppose. Why is it one line?

As far as I can tell, the training books were written by people
who never knew what circulation is, never knew what energy
is, and who couldn't do a Zhukovsky transformation if their life
depended on it. Now I'm not saying that *pilots* should do
Zhukovsky transformations --- I had a PhD in physics and a
flight instructor certificate long before I ever did one --- but
they guys who write the books ought to do them (or, nowadays,
a finite-element analysis, or some experiments) so that they can
know the difference between common sense and the much more
common monsense. And pilots *should* be taught about
circulation and about energy.

"John S. Denker" wrote:

At 05:51 AM 7/29/99 +0000, K. Lee Lerner wrote in part:
The text explained that atmospheric
Oxygen was, of course, a diatomic molecule and that the leading edge of the
wing separated the atoms in the molecule. To further this lunacy, the two
oxygen atoms were depicted as being attached by springs, apparently to
explain that the attraction of the Oxygen atoms for one another grew as they
were separated.

...
And to think we later flew at 400 knots 200 feet off the deck in
machines designed by the same folks who wrote the engineering text!

Oh, I doubt it was the same folks. Real airplane designers would ....