How do wings generate lift when flying upside down?
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You can fly with flat panels for wings, you just need to tilt them so that they can produce lift. Most aircraft don’t tilt their whole wing, they have another panel that hangs of the back of the wing that they can move up and down. Moving the panel up and down has the same effect as tilting the wing. When you fly upside down, you move the panel at the back of the wing the opposite way to normal and the lift will keep the aircraft in the air.
I think the problem you are having is not considering design. They still generate “lift” so long as the direction the plane is going allows air to flow over both sides of the wings. Some planes are seriously hard to get upside down by design, they are built stable snd are effective at what they do. These are cargo, airliners, most small passenger planes.
There are planes designed to go upside down and they are built unstable. They can easily go upside down and back. These planes are not fuel efficient and rely on a lot of power to keep them going in the direction they are pointed rather than relying a lot of the effects of “lift”.
Then there are rockets. Very little wing space, all fuel and power. What does upside down even mean to a rocket?
They don’t. They generate negative lift (downward force). That’s why you need another airfoil (e.g. an elevator) and lots of thrust to fly continuously upside down.
Airplane wings generate lift by deflecting air downwards. Newton’s laws are sufficient. A flat wing that is inclined to deflect incoming air downward will generate reactive forces upward.
Wing shapes can change the airflow profiles to increase attack angles, before stalling. The Bernoulli explanations of differential surface speeds only cause confusion.
So an inverted wing generates lift by angling into the airflow so that incoming air is deflected downwards. The same way that normally inverted wings operate.
In practice, high performance aerobatic airplanes, like the Extra 300, have a symmetrical wing. The top and bottom of the wing have the same shape. So the wing works equally well in either orientation.
While wings are designed to work best the right way up, they do also work upside down.
You need to angle them differently and have higher drag, but they work good enough
Angle of attack = cord line to relative wind. It the cordline is positive then you could have lift(with enough speed and in good clean air) if you flip the wing as long as the cord line to relative wind is positive you can keep flying. If you reduce aoa you decend. Kinda like a sports car(f1) the spoiler is there to push the car back down. Works the same way as our wing just tilting the angle of attack the opiate direction.
Can anyone explain that why do planes even fly when straight?
I flew aerobatics for years. ELI5 response…most airplanes are designed to be stable. Dihedral (the V shape of the wing when viewed from head on, and the shape of the wing are designed to make it return to level flight when you’re not steering.
Now imagine a plain wooden ruler. If that was the wing, and you were upside down, pulled your hands off the steering wheel, you would notice the plane continued in the same direction it’s pointed.
Important to note that different planes are built for their respective purpose. Planes built for general aviation (i.e Cessna, Piper, Bonanza) and commercial aircraft are built inherently stable and will “seek” to keep the wings straight and level in the absence of control inputs. Planes built for military and aerobatics will have wings that are much more straight when looking at them head on.
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