Soaring Higher: Understanding A Lift

The Bernoulli's Principle


Wright's plane


Biggest aircraft, the Airbus A380

To be updated...it's 4.51am and I need to catch some sleep. See you in a few hours...in the meantime, feel free to leave a message, will you?

UPDATE: Now, it's time for the update after more than 24 hours and not the few hours as promised -- moral of the story: sleepy people should not make promises. I should strive to be more dedicated in maintaining this blog. And thank you legendarychipmunk and wong for the message.

The reason the Bernoulli's principle is in this entry is because back in school we were taught that an airplane lifts because of the dynamics between speed and pressure. The greater the speed, the lower the pressure and therefore the plane lifts.

That has been the way I described a lift. Today, I realised that was not entirely it.

According to this site, the issue of a lift should not be principled based on Bernoulli's theory alone. "There is nothing wrong with the Bernoulli principle, or with the statement that the air goes faster over the top of the wing," said David Anderson of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Scott Eberhardt of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Washington. However, there are other dynamics at work when a plane lifts, they said. Newton's is one of them.

But I would not go into disucssing the article, lest I second-guess what both experts are saying and be on the wrong side again. You can read the interesting article "How Airplanes Fly: A Physical Description of Lift" yourself.