Swedish Aerodynamics Dissident: Martin Ingelman-Sundberg

From inside the wind tunnel at the Aeronautical Research Institute of Sweden headed by Ingelman-Sundberg.

Martin Ingelman-Sundberg (1922 - 2005) was Head of the Low-speed Aerodynamics Section at the Aeronautical Research Institute of Sweden 1951 - 83 and a strong critic of the theory of flight by Kutta-Zhukovsky-Prandtl.  He expresses his harsh criticism in Describing Aerodynamic Lift Fundamentally Wrong for Eight Decades available on a site to his memory, as follows:

• The university teaching in both aerodynamics and fluid mechanics must be reformed. 
• The physics behind the mathematics must be taught. 
• Today aerodynamiscists excellently calculate a local pressure change but few can describe the physics.
• Today's unnecessary mysticism about lift and flying can be eliminated to the general public.
• Probably it can also prevent an accident now and then.

I share these views and it is too bad that I did not get the chance to meet Martin in real life.  But his ideas are alive and he offers moral support from his position in cyber space to skeptics of the existing paradigm.

PS Martin Ingelman-Sundberg was responsible for the aerodynamic design of all the Swedish military airplanes developed during his time of service, but did not believe in the aerodynamic theory taught at the university. A stronger clash between theory and practice is hard to come up with. DS