Yes I've been flying professionally for 24 years.
When you drink out of a straw, aren't you sucking the coke into your mouth? Well an engineer might point out that actually what you are doing is creating a low pressure area above the drink and allowing the high pressure atmosphere around the drink to force the fluid up the straw and into your mouth. Does this make the original statement wrong? Not really, it just expounds upon it and goes into more detail.
Equal transit time IMO is simply an incorrect inference. The air going over the top of the wing is certainly moving faster and creating lower pressure (and resulting in lift) than the air going under the wing. I don't think that two adjacent molecules splitting up at the front of a wing and rejoining at the trailing edge of the wing was the thrust of how Bernoulli principle was explained to me way back when. Bernoulli certainly applies to airflow since air is a fluid. Where geeks go crazy is thinking that the shape of the wing is the only thing creating differential pressure. Heck, an isosceles triangle has a flat bottom and a longer path on top but it certainly wouldn't create enough lift to fly by running it quickly through the atmosphere. The real story is that the air going over the wing not only travels faster than the air going underneath, but in fact much faster than would be calculated simply by measuring the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge and dividing by the speed.
The high pressure air underneath and the low pressure air on top are affected by the shape, but also by the angle of attack. By rotating the wing in relation to the incoming air, you are effectively changing the shape of the wing with regard to how air flows over it. The point where the oncoming air hits the leading edge of the wing gets lower as the angle increases, which effectively makes the air going over the top travel an even greater distance than a wing with a lower angle of attack, thereby increasing the pressure differential and increasing lift.
This is the point where the drinking straw naysayers would point out that the "wings" of an airplane are not all designed like the main wing with a flat bottom and a curved top. I say this because not all "wings" as you probably know are designed for one way lift like the main wing of an airplane. The rudder, stabilizer, and other types of airfoils need to turn in both directions and are symmetrical in crosssection....so the only way they make lift is by changing AOA. But if AOA was the sole creator of lift, then the main wing wouldn't be shaped like it is with a mostly flat bottom and a curved top. So how can some planes fly upside down? Well they simply generate enough AOA in the opposite direction from the natural lift direction to overcome those little Bernoullis zipping over the wings surface. I can promise that a fighter, with its thin, high speed wing, is a lot more nose up when flying inverted than it would be flying at the same speed while upright. The best way to think of AOA and lift is by imagining sticking your hand flat out of a car window and then angling it up and down....the wind makes your arm want to climb and descend. But just like the soda straw geeks, I could draw a diagram of how tilting your hand to change the angle of attack simply creates high pressure on one side of your hand and low pressure on the other. Its just easier to think of it as the wind hitting one side of your hand and not the other.
None of what I just typed means that the idea of Bernoulli's law creating lift is false. Its just not the whole enchilada of flying. I would hardly call the use the simplified explanation of lift to gradeschool students and laypersons a fallacy. Certainly not on the level of whether the earth is flat or not.
