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Reply to "Airplane on a treadmill"

quote:
Originally posted by Jugflier:
quote:
Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:
Because I'm bored, here's a brain teaser for your 4th of July weekend:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyor). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyor moves in the opposite direction. This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor to be exactly the same, but in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?


Yes, the conveyor/runway would double the ground speed of the wheels. The real airspeed is generated by the prop thrust, not the runway speed.


It seems that if this were true when a plane were on the runway with it's brakes applied and the pilot throttled up his engine the plane would take off just sitting still.

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