Lift
Imagine air flowing over a stationary airfoil, such as an aircraft wing. Far ahead of the airfoil, the air travels at a uniform velocity. To flow past the airfoil, however, it must “split” in two, part of the flow traveling on top and part traveling on the bottom.
My father’s caregiver rose from her chair at his celebration of life for what I imagined would be a few rueful words but instead burst into a hymn that shot our down-to-earth, secular gathering into the clouds, and I wondered if she had spoken to my father about God on their grocery runs, and if he had shared how the spirit of his best friend Bob had saved his life in 1944 by righting his aircraft two hundred feet above the ground, reinforcing his belief that he was special, a grandiosity I nurtured by writing The Life and Times of the Creator’s Miracle Man, all those banal milestones spun out through a large and easy-to-read font, not like the print size in my first book of stories, the one I dedicated in part to the memory of Bob.
Drag
A rough surface will induce more frictional drag than a smooth surface. To reduce viscous drag, swimmers attempt to make contact surfaces as smooth as possible by wearing swim caps and shaving their legs. Likewise, an aircraft’s wing is designed to be smooth to reduce drag.
Sometime after the mock fashion show in their Florida retirement park where my father wore my mother’s two-piece bathing suit, I had my ear pierced, an act that provoked such grief in him that he compared it to Bob’s airplane crash in 1941, and soon after all the warm memories of swimming with his friend in the St. Lawrence River and camping on an island in a “tent made for two” drifted into darker stories about how the BB from my father’s gun, ricocheting off the glistening snow crust, sent Bob crumpling to the earth and how that thin layer of ice on the surface of the field impeded my father as he rushed toward his friend, convinced he had killed him, and I could not share my own childhood stories because I had played with toy guns and, in any case, he only wanted me to listen.
Weight
A small plane must be appropriately “balanced” for flight, for too much weight in the back or front can render the plane unstable. Weight can be calculated using a form of Newton’s second law: W = mg where W is weight, m is mass, and g is the acceleration due to gravity on Earth.
I have loving memories of my father but so often it’s the heavy ones that come first, imposing themselves in the same way he once pressed his lips against my head in the ticket line for a hockey game, delivering a message of an impending crime that I felt more than heard, the words vibrating from back to front but not discernible, like so many of his other words I could never get through my thick skull, but I understood a young guy was trying to sneak into the game with a bad ticket, the kind of masculine rebel my father wished I would be so long as I was not challenging his own power or values.
Thrust
Thrust itself is a force than can best be described by Newton’s second law. The basic form of this law is: F = ma which states that force (F) is equal to mass (m) times acceleration (a). Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity over time.
I grew up in a white family, although my father’s sister lived with a Black woman for forty years, her sexual orientation and skin color forever unnamed, so it was odd my father would specify a Black man with an earring had mistakenly jumped the line at the bank, and how my father had playfully set him straight, but I was also surprised by his admiration for the man’s earring and how he mused about getting one himself, a flight of fancy, yes, but still an indication that time had erased the memory of his pain from my own piercing, a hole allowed to grow over long ago, although it re-emerges from time to time when I write.
Excerpts from “Theory of Flight”, Man-Vehicle Laboratory, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 16 March 1997.
Based in Montreal, Mark Foss is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. His CNF appears or is forthcoming in great weather for MEDIA, Pithead Chapel, Lost Balloon and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of The Book of Judith (New Village Press, 2022), an homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. Visit him at www.markfoss.ca or www.facebook.com/markfosscanada.
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