I remember reading a couple years ago that’s not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is “close enough” and “seems right”, and it really doesn’t matter unless you’re a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
I remember reading a couple years ago that’s not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is “close enough” and “seems right”, and it really doesn’t matter unless you’re a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
“With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly.”