Airplane on a Conveyor Belt
Jason Kottke live blogged last night’s, presumably, now infamous episode of Mythbusters when an airplane on a conveyor belt defied conventional logic and took off. It’s a really complicated matter of physics going on here, but the jist is this… An airplane is not like a car, it’s wheels are not where the power from the engines goes. They are free spinning with very little frictional contact to the rest of the plane, the power from the engines pulls/pushes the air around it allowing forward momentum. The conveyor belt could have been going a million times the speed of light in the opposite direction to the plane and as long as the engine was going at “take-off” speed, the plane would take off… Awesome huh?