Sort of off topic, but reverse thrust sort of boggles my mind. If you're sucking air in from the front of the aircraft and ejecting it out the front, don't those forces counterbalance each other?
In a jet engine though, you have a nozzle on the back, so the input area is greater than the output area. Heating the air also causes it to take up much more volume. These put together, mean that the output velocity is much greater than the input velocity, so there is a momentum transfer from the atmosphere to the plane.