I don't think so. What I was talking about was analagous to throwing a curveball in baseball. I'm pretty sure this force points "through" the center of mass, so it wouldn't apply any torque to cause the frisbee to flip - unless maybe if the frisbee is already tilting, perhaps then it could create a torque to accelerate that tilting? This might make sense if the spin is such that the higher side of the frisbee is moving slower relative to the air and the lower part is moving faster. Hmmm.....

All this is a bit much. Is there some simple model from which all these behaviors would emerge? Something involving CFD, maybe, so we don't need to do all this analysis?

[edited by - TerranFury on May 6, 2003 10:16:02 AM]