NJRCFLYER2,

It worked. I floated up in the air.

Nah I see what you are saying, I am not proposing that you could, for example, roll a pickup truck by standing inside the bed and pushing against the cab.

In the course of this thread, I have brought up rockets, balloons, submarines and other things. It does seem that I am losing focus. I think that instead, I may be closing in on my real point.

I'm not a professional engineer, I'm a cattle rancher with a high school education and an interest in this kind of stuff. The thing that is teasing my mind is this:

These things are obvious...

If I stand inside a box and push against the walls, the box won't slide across the ground.

If I jack a car up in the garage, it won't make the garage any lighter, and pulling on my chair wont make it levitate.

I'm not an idiot, I'm just hanging up on the idea that a helicopter, or bird or flying insect doesn't physically interact with the box in perfectly OPPOSITE directions like all of the previous examples. A helicopter doesnt screw itself into the air like its on a giant auger mounted to the ground. A bird doesn't support itself in the air on invisible blocks, stacked all the way to the bottom of the container.

I am by no means (obviously) an aeronautical expert, but clearly an airfoil moving through the air, driven by a power source, generates lift independent of the ground. (Ignoring ground effect, etc)

The lift comes from the driven airfoil interacting with the air passing immediately over it, not by interacting with the box or whatever else happens to be in the vicinity.