Re: helicopter not equal rocket

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 12:55 PM 8/20/99 -0400, Michael Edmiston wrote:
> We (at least me) acknowledge the Bernoulli-ists
> view and we agree those equations work and have value.

OK, good.  We agree on one thing.

>  But we are at a
> loss as to why we are not allowed to view the wing as a reaction
> engine.

According to your definition of reaction engine, the wing is a reaction
engine, so by definition you are correct: you can view the wing as a
reaction engine.  End of discussion.

> The jet engine gets thrust by causing air to be thrown out its
> back.  The wing gets lift by causing air to be thrown downward.

1) As I have said before, a machine-gun model produces no upwash.  It
therefore cannot account for the observed dependence of induced drag on
airspeed, ground effect, and wingspan.  Most conspicuously, it cannot
account for the decrease in induced drag when two airplanes establish
formation flight (wingtip to wingtip).

2) To say that some air is thrown downward is not wrong, but it is grossly
incomplete.  It begs the question of *how much* air is thrown downward.  It
could be a paper-thin sheet of air thrown downward with great velocity, or
it could be a huge pillar of air thrown down quite gently.  Unless you have
a way  of predicting how much air is affected, your theory is quite
inferior to the orthodox theories that provide quantitative and intuitive
predictions of the amount of upwash and downwash, near and far from the wing.

You may be suffering from a variant of the bullet fallacy;  see
  http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/how/htm/airfoils.html#sec_fluid
for more on this.