(November 2011) It is a bracing feeling to stand up and deny accepted knowledge. So bracing, in fact, that I try to do it as often as possible. I have argued (countless times) that downwind turns are no different from upwind ones, dismissed as a wives’ tale the common notion that the horizontal tail of an airplane always provides a downward force, and attributed P factor to several things but not to the supposedly increased angle of attack of the downgoing blade. I have denounced countless physics textbooks for their stupid explanations of wing lift, but defended Bernoulli against the assaults of revisionist Newtonians.
I am always on the lookout for some piece of accepted wisdom to deny, and so I was immediately interested when a friend sent me a copy of an article with the title “Questioning the Overbanking Tendency.” I did not have to read far to discover the author’s answer: “For all practical purposes,” he states, “there is no such thing as an overbanking tendency.”
