It never ceases to amaze me how emotional some people get about the explanation of aircraft wing lift ( 8 July, p 50 and 29 July, p 66). There was a long correspondence in these pages a couple of years ago, but it seems to have snuck back in again.
There are many alternative but equivalent ways of describing the mechanism of lift: different path lengths and Bernoulli, circulation and the Magnus effect, deflected downwash and inertial reaction, conformal transformations of cylinder flow to Zoukowski aerofoils, and so on. All are fundamentally derived from Newtonian mechanics and the single assumption of trailing-edge-flow closure (the Kutta condition). To suggest that one of these is the "true cause" and the others are merely "consequences" or erroneous is fatuous. It often stems from a misunderstanding of the alternative descriptions.
You might as well argue about the true cause of a body ...
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