Surprising Error in the New Yorker, now corrected

[WordMan]

I was reading an article in the latest issue of the New Yorker, about the science of paper jams. Here it is online: Why Paper Jams Persist | The New Yorker

About 10 paragraphs in, they start discussing the Bernoulli effect. In the paper copy I have, I read:

@New Yorker

Because the top side of an airplane wing is flat, while the underside is curved, the air above moves faster than the air below, and the wing rises. “If you have jets of air shooting above the corners, the airflow will lower the pressure, and they’ll lift,”

Bwah?! That’s backwards - top is curved, bottom is flat. Sure enough that link online is corrected and at the bottom it now says:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the shape of airplane wings.

Not a big deal, really, but I am still stunned that the New Yorker’s fact checkers missed something like that and it got to print.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

The ‘corrected’ explanation is still wrong, of course—after all, how would the air going over the wing know how fast to go in order to meet up with the right ‘packet’ of air that went below? How would stuntplanes fly upside down? Hell, how could paper airplanes stay aloft?

In fact, wing shape has little to do with how planes fly; in the end, it’s all just Newton’s third law: air goes down, plane goes up. (For more explanation, see e.g. here.)

[Chronos]

Which is complicated by the fact that they do use the Bernoulli effect, but that doesn’t mean what most people think it means. The Bernoulli effect is actually just the statement of Newton’s second law in a fluid context, rather than in the discrete-objects context where it’s usually discussed.

[carnivorousplant]

@Chronos

Which is complicated by the fact that they do use the Bernoulli effect, but that doesn’t mean what most people think it means. The Bernoulli effect is actually just the statement of Newton’s second law in a fluid context, rather than in the discrete-objects context where it’s usually discussed.

Motion is proportional to force and inversely proportional to mass. How is that related to the Bernoulli equation?

[Richard_Pearse]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

The ‘corrected’ explanation is still wrong, of course—after all, how would the air going over the wing know how fast to go in order to meet up with the right ‘packet’ of air that went below? How would stuntplanes fly upside down? Hell, how could paper airplanes stay aloft?

In fact, wing shape has little to do with how planes fly; in the end, it’s all just Newton’s third law: air goes down, plane goes up. (For more explanation, see e.g. here.)

Bernoulli is fine actually. So is Newton. They are different ways of measuring the same thing. What is missing is that wing curvature is not the only thing that accelerates the air mass.

See here for further info, https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/bernnew.html

[Mr_Downtown]

Well, I’m more intrigued by how the Bernouilli Effect can act on paper sheets lying flat in a photocopier tray. If you’re just having a tube that lowers the pressure on the top side of the paper, that’s a sucker, not an airfoil.