Creating Lift

When a wing slices through air, two things happen to the air. First, the air

О The new Eurofighter Typhoon has delta wings and uses canards for lift and maneuverability.

flowing over the curved top of the wing speeds up. As Bernoulli’s principle states, when air speeds up, its pres­sure falls. Low air pressure above a wing and higher pressure below it produce an upward force. Second, a wing deflects air downward. According to Newton’s third law of motion, forcing air downward produces an equal and opposite force that pushes the wing upward. The total upward force on a wing is lift.

If a wing is tilted up at the front, it deflects air downward even more power­fully and produces more lift and more drag. The angle between a wing and the airflow is called the wing’s angle of attack. If the angle of attack is increased too much, the wing will stall. When a wing stalls, the smooth flow of air over it breaks up, and lift sud­denly disappears.