What is it, really, that keeps an airplane in the air?

In the latest issue of Australia Flying magazine, columnist and flight instructor Jim Davies talks about what keeps an airplane in the air. He discussed the same topic two years in what I thought was an incredible article: no one really seems to know for sure how lift works! It's really bizarre. The Bernoulii effect is one of the main explanations, but it's actually wrong. I remember my junior college physics teacher saying to us, 'We can use the Bernoullliiii effect to describe how planes fly...'

A reader commented in the Letters section in the following issue: "Forget all the grand Newtonian theories, Bernoulli wind flows, action/reaction relations. They are all invariably wrong. A plane stays in the air because of money."

Davis talks about how the Aussie authorities still refuses to accept the errors of the traditional explanations of flight. The nonsensical 'two air molecules will wave each other goodbye and move apart when they hit the wings, and then be reconciled together at the end of the wing' traditional theory. NASA has a 'myth-buster' webpage here.


Actually, no matter what the theory is, I still find it very unintuitive. Like, how does the duck fly when it's so fat? They are really very well engineered, is all I can say at this point in time...