I wish every presentation on how planes fly started with an actual flat plane. A wing that has a flat crossection. I think the shape of the airfoil of the wing is absolutely distracting and prevents people from understanding what is really happening.

Every person who ever stuck a flat object outside the window of a moving car knows that you do not need a fancy shape to have lift.

And so many people are stuck thinking that the shape of the airfoil is responsible for the plane to be able to fly, supposedly because the air needs to run a longer way around the foil above the wing than below the wing. And this somehow causes pressure difference due to Bernoulli law and this is what keeps the plane up. Which is almost total BS because planes can obviously fly inverted.

Now I admit I only skimmed the article, and although the animations are beautiful, I am missing what really is key to understanding of what is happening.

I am looking for a bigger, far away view of the wing and showing what happens to the air BEHIND the wing.

Because how the plane really works is as it flies forward, it diverts large masses of air downwards. It pushes off of air.

Part of the air is diverted by the lower portion of the wing, but the much larger portion of lift is generated by larger masses of air above and behind the wing. Those can be thought as being sucked down behind the wing (if you look at it from the point of view of a stationary air mass, not from the point of view of the wing).

And the main role of the airfoil is to keep that mass of air behind the wing stuck to the airfoil at wide range of angles and speeds as possible, because a flat sheet is very poor at doing this.