EQUAL AND OPPOSITE ABSTRACTIONS!
Well, now it's getting interesting. We have two plausible but completely conficting explanations. I love this about flight. This theory of air bunching up at the leading edge seems to fit the facts better. It's not married to a closed system. The air is free to move as fast as we can observe. The pressure syetems behave more like most pressure system we normally hear about: high moves to low. Why not, to like? There's one small problem. A lot of aerobatic craft and fighter jets have wings that are curved equally on both sides. They still manage to generate lift. How do we explain that? A truly acceptable explanation would have to include right-side-up, upside-down, high-speed, and low-speed fight. Are we there yet? Not quite. Another group of fight minded folks say that it's all about air deflection.
NEWTON? NEWTON? ISAAC NEWTON?
Remember sticking your hand out the window of the moving car? Angled upward, air deflected off the bottom, much like a kite in the wind. This could be how aerobatic planes achieve a good deal of lift. Lots of power makes up for symmetrical wing design, which would yield no lift when parallel to air fow. Remember back a paragraph or two when we proved that if a wing is curved on top but flat on the bottom, then the air on top is going faster than the air on the bottom? That causes the air at the trailing edge of the wing to shoot downward as it leaves the wing. Some claim fight is just a straight, Newtonian opposite-and-equal-reaction proposition. Air gets thrown down; so the wings get pushed up. Figure 17 on the next page shows the Newtonian theory in action, The lower pressure system is just a mechanism that causes the air to get tossed around. Add that to the angle of attack effect, and maybe you have a theory. I like the simplicity. But it doesn't quite account for all that measurable low pressure on the top of wings that have a curved upper surface.
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