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Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics

Name: Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics
Description: 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.

Michigan Engineering Talks intermediate

Open on YouTube First HN thread

4 HN users recommended this talk in 3 different months between 2019 and 2021.

2007–2026

1 strong recommendation 3 recommendations HackerTube score 3.5

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

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.

Pull quote: “You might get something out of this 2013 talk by former Boeing engineer Doug McLean on misconceptions about lift.” (HN, 2021)

Also tagged: aerodynamic lift, aerodynamics, lift, physics misconceptions, boeing, fluid dynamics

What Hacker News said

4 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Strongly recommends theothermkn June 2019 under To Build a Better Teapot, Researchers Create Liquid Helix

Debunks common theories of lift against observed phenomena.

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 [this 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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Recommends zkms February 2020 under The mysteries of aerodynamic lift

Boeing fellow on intuitive explanations of aerodynamic lift.

Doug McLean (Boeing Technical Fellow) has a quite decent talk about the question of intuitive explanations for aerodynamic lift: [this video] Also Philippe Spalart's quote is right on the money: "It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist".

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Recommends raverbashing June 2021 under Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight

Explains why the common lift explanation is wrong.

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 [this 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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Recommends MaxBarraclough June 2021 under Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight

Talk by former Boeing engineer on lift misconceptions.

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