Plane thread

Does Veeky Forums like airplanes?

It still baffles me that they fly. Kind of like even though you know how a boat works sometimes you have to stop and wonder if it makes sense that all that shouldn't just sink to the bottom of the ocean.

You mean like lift? Not a hard concept cars do it too. I have more issues with how the fuck can the an-22 produce enough power to take off.

Airplanes are fascinating but realistically I prefer things that are more affordable and don't inevitably kill you when their propulsion fails.

No, I get the physics behind how lift works. It's just that when you're in a commercial airliner or you're watching one take off, it really just doesn't look like they're going fast enough down the runway to take off and then it's like a magician casts a spell and then just go straight up into the sky.

Meanwhile they're running the engines all up and down just to taxi around.

And then the next thing you know they're 10k feet in the sky and going 600MPH. I think the trick is to understand how much better the engines work at speed vs. a standstill.

That's no different than driving a suburban at 130mph. It feels like you're going 55mph. You don't feel like you're going fast in large craft.

>Meanwhile they're running the engines all up and down just to taxi around.
The 777s just idle when they taxi. Most aircraft don't even turn on both of their engines until they are about to prepare for lineup and taxi on a single engine. Also aircraft go from producing somewhere around 700lbs of thrust to 4,500lbs of thrust at idle and go from that to 11,000-115,000lbs.

I wouldn't wanna drive a Suburban at 130 mph with all that dodgy Detroit pickup truck engineering in it.

Yeah if you're downwind from an air strip you can hear when they really turn the engines on during takeoff. I think it's just one of those things where it makes perfect sense mathematically but for the way humans have nonlinearities in their direct sense perception it kind of defies your expectations of how reality is supposed to work.

I had to take like 5 flights in a row the other month and it was neat to feel the power/weight ratios of each model when taxiing, how much they had to run them up and how long it took before the thing started rolling. The tiny puddle jumper was my favorite because they really had to gun it just to taxi, and then it took off and landed on these little runways -- that's my kind of car :D

It gets crazier when you get on certain aircraft. I was on a fully loaded 737-900er and this fucker barely made clearing height on a 11,000ft runway. Yet when I flew to Japan I've gotten on 777s that clear that rotate at 7,000ft. Crazy how that shit works.

One of the flights was the the pilot's final flight before retiring. It departed 45min late and arrived 20min early and you could feel during some of the turns and narration about what we could see looking out the windows (he gave both sides a chance to see some things) that it wasn't on autopilot the whole time.

It got me thinking they probably are building in quite a bit of fuel efficiency for routine flights.