Now imagine that you are a nervous flyer preparing for take-off. As the plane starts to taxi, the man next to you leans over and says, “You know they don’t really understand what keeps these things in the air.”
The most disturbing thing about this scenario is not that you have to sit in a confined space next to a crackpot conspiracy theorist for the next three hours, but that he may be less deluded than youthink. Across the internet, websites and videos are popping up that claim that the theory used to explain the mechanics of flight is incorrect. And some of these doubters have substance to their arguments.
The explanation under fire is “Bernoulli’s principle” (pronounced Bear-noo-lee), which states that faster-moving air has