Formula One cars carry wings too, only mounted upside down
An aircraft wing is shaped and angled to push air downward, so the air pushes the wing up. Flip that same device over and bolt it to a racing car, and it presses the tyres into the track for extra grip at speed. Sails, propellers, kites and helicopter rotors all exploit the same trick.
A wing is any structure that generates lift, along with drag, as it moves through air. Its behaviour depends on its cross-section, the airfoil, and its outline seen from above, the planform, and its efficiency is measured as the ratio of lift to drag. Hydrofoil boats, foiling sailboats and submarine diving planes use the same principle in water. The word comes from Old Norse vængr and long meant mainly a bird's forelimb before stretching to insects, bats, boomerangs and aircraft.
Tilted at a suitable angle of attack, a wing turns the passing air downward, and by Newton's reasoning the air pushes back. That reaction shows up as lower pressure above the wing and higher pressure beneath, which can be measured directly or worked out from airspeed with Bernoulli's principle. Velocity differences, pressure differences, the turning of the flow and the lift itself are simply different descriptions of one phenomenon, and done correctly every method gives the same answer. Exact solutions require the Navier–Stokes equations, which are hard to solve except for simple shapes.
Most subsonic wings are cambered, curved more on top. Symmetrical ones still lift at a positive angle and suit aerobatic planes because they behave the same inverted, though they stall at higher speeds. Near the speed of sound, supercritical airfoils, flat on top and curved underneath, curb the steep rise in drag. Pilots reshape wings in flight with flaps and slats, roll with ailerons, and dump lift with spoilers, while winglets reduce tip vortices and swing wings on aircraft such as the F-14 sweep back for supersonic speed. Upward-angled dihedral improves roll stability.
Francis Rogallo invented the fully limp flexible wing in 1948, the ancestor of hang gliders and paragliders. The Space Shuttle used its wings only to glide down to a runway. In nature, wings evolved separately in insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats; the vertebrate versions grew from existing limbs, while insect wings arose as entirely new structures.
Source: Wing
