I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I’ve seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just… Soars… Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf… It’s crazy. With how much these things weigh, it’s insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we’re flying now. Like wow… Dude crazy.
I hate that everybody’s like, it’s not that big a deal.
We only started doing it 124 years ago! Prior to that it was a very big deal indeed.
Everyone’s so fucking smart these days, there’s no room for a sense of wonder. It’s like being blasé and knowledgeable is cool. It’s really not.
You keep flying with your beautiful sense of wonder, Buttflapper!
Well fucking said. Smoke noodles rarely have room for curiosity, which is where new things often come from.
Edit: Not sure how smarmy know-it-alls became that, but I’m not changing it now
I’m pretty sure i can’t trust Arthur Vandelay, they are the kind of people that would pass off something they did as if it wasnt intentional
I don’t need ignorance to feel wonder. I think things are cooler when I can marvel at the complex mechanics behind it all.
True. But I wasn’t arguing that.
What puts me in awe of things like flight isn’t the act itself, but the brilliance of the people who designed it to work. I look at the aerodynamic shape of an airfoil and think “we did that…humans”.
To be fair, we sorta knew it was possible because birds. I think it’s more impressive when we don’t know what can happen, like breaking the sound barrier or putting people in space.
That’s the thing though, what’s amazing about planes really depends on your knowledge base or what experience is specifically being enjoyed. If you don’t understand how planes work then the difference is moot because whether seeing or doing the entire thing is magical. If you do understand how planes work you might know that the crazy thing isn’t flight, we knew how to do that since approximately 1800 when the first gliders were built, the crazy part was generating enough power to make powered flight possible. If you understand how flight works and are still enjoying the experience of flight is where wonder still exists.
You know the wonder of flight still exists because some number of kids and adults would pick flight as a super power if given the choice.
You think that’s crazy? The ship that blocked the Suez Canal, the Ever Given, has a ship displacement (how much water is displaced when it sits in the ocean) of 265,000 Tons.
That’s 240 million kilograms.
And that shit just floats on fucking water maaaaan…
Since when 1000kg is not equal to one tonne?
There are tons of tons, believe it or not.
There’s the short ton (2000lbs), long ton (2240 lbs), and tonne (1000kgs) which are all measure weight. However there’s also the shipping/freight/ocean ton which is a measure of volume (which is also different in the US and UK), and the register ton.
However I did make a mistake. The wikipedia page I was reading said the weight in t and long tons. I made the mistake of assuming they meant short tons - in reality when measuring displacement for a ship, tonnes are used (which is pretty sensible, considering you’re displacing water and a liter of water to a kilogram of water have a pretty easy conversion formula formula…)
I see, the common “Americans will use anything but SI”, but in this case it’s also the Brits lol
Thanks for explanation
This guy tons.
Ton (imperial) is 2000lb vs tonne (metric)
Don’t get them going about their crazy units!
it works because we believe in it. if everyone would lose faith in airplanes, they’d drop out of the sky.
Can I just lose faith in the private jets?
And will it fly higher if we have the Faith of the Heart?
WhhaaahhhHH!!!
easier yet, if everyone crams to the tail, it will likely crash
Wait until you find out about electricity! 🤯
Computers is teachibg rocks to think
We grow flawless crystals, slice them into perfect disks, engrave billions of arcane runes onto them with magical potions and rays of light, animate them with lightning, and make them do our bidding.
And then we give them an “intelligence” that can’t even count the Rs in strawberry…
Saw
this the other day, seems relevant to your commentTry looking at a die under a microscope
By filling them with lightning
Magnets, how do they work?
Does anyone actually know? We have laws and math that predict and model behavior but last time I checked know one knew why.
I mean, big magnets work because they are made of electrons that have their magnetic fields aligned so they don’t cancel each other out. Now, as for why electrons have magnetic fields in the first place, that we don’t know
And telephones! Even en old-school analogue phone is pretty amazing how sound becomes an electrical signal and then is converted back to sound at the other end.
Modern digital phones are just pure magic compared to analogue phones.
Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
tomato tomato =P
or magnets!
Dafuq is this!? Stress testing?
No, every once in a while the planes need to stretch out. They get tired from being so stiff. This helps their joints later in their life span.
Basically. The wings have to be able to bend that much so they don’t break off in strong winds or hard maneuvers.
I used to think so until I realised that air and water are both fluids, except air is thinner.
To be clear to anyone with minds being blown: air is gas and gas is a type of fluid. Water is liquid and liquid is also a type of fluid.
… gas is a type of fluid.
that goes a long way in explaining some of those farts.
Exactly. Ever skip a stone on the surface of a lake? It’s like that, except it’s a continuous skip, with air instead of water, and you’re inside the stone.
That’s a bad analogy.
It was a joke.
I would be equally amazed to see something denser than water swimming.
Mythbusters has an episode where they swim in non-newtonian fluid
Like a submarine?
Submarines work by manipulating their density, don’t they? Then they just float at whatever level matches their density.
Yeah, they’re more like dirigibles than airplanes. But same as airplanes, people have had a hard time believing that something made of metal can float.
Airplane engines have deceptively high thrust, imagine each one as a rocket and it’ll start to make sense. The a380 (the big double decker) each engine produces around 350KN. When that thrust is applied to an 80kg human they’ll experience almost 450Gs of force
In an extreme sense, imagine putting a little rocket engine on a paper airplane which will represent a high thrust to weight ratio
Your last description is essentially the idea behind the F-117a. That thing
isn’twasn’t flying,it’sit was achieving escape velocity.
I’m a mechanical engineer and have a general understanding of how wings work. I’ve flown many times. That shit still feels like magic to me.
I was most impressed by the sheer amount of power those engines put out when you finally take off. The acceleration gave me a boost of adrenaline when I flew for the first time (it was a Southwest Boeing 737)
And I can only imagine how they feel when empty.
The 777 is 375-ish tons, and the A380 is 630-ish tons.
I know right… the wings dont even flap!
They really should.
Lazy, if you ask me.
They flap pretty good in heavy turbulence.
I’m not sure that’s quite the same
Planes get excited when they encounter turbulence, so they flap their wings. It’s so cute!
Don’t forget how high you get.
ARE. OP is clearly very high right now.
If you get high enough, the idea of heavier-than-air objects not inevitably succumbing to gravity may fill you with wonder as well.
Consider the amount of air its wings must displace in order to stay aloft. An equal quantity of mass at least. It’s passing through that air and, partly pushing it down, but also partially scraping it thin over the bowed top surface of the wing (the Bernoulli principle) which creates a pressure differential that lifts the wing, pulling it upward through suction, and thus the plane. That’s why the plane must go fast to fly, and why it “stalls” and falls if it isn’t moving through enough air. It’s also how turbulence affects a plane. Differences in air pressure mean that in pockets of low pressure there isn’t as much mass being displaced by the wings, not enough lift so it falls.
Now, it’s quite likely that my layman’s comprehension of this is flawed. But I’m sure it’s entirely possible that someone will correct me soon :3
To be pedantic: It’s not necessarily an equal amount of mass, it just has to accelerate (this includes deceleration which is acceleration opposing a component of a vector of travel) any amount of mass along and opposite to the vector of the plane’s acceleration due to gravity so long as the amount of mass (and the averaged amount of that mass’ acceleration in the aforementioned direction i.e. force) is in ratio with the planes mass and it’s acceleration due to gravity.
There’s a lot of other pedantic caveats but they’d make this comment far too long. The main thing I want to convey is that mass doesn’t necessarily matter but rather force (m*v) and also that the “suction” and thereby acceleration that a plane’s airfoil experiences is also it causing an acceleration on the air around it by decelerating it along the path that it wants to flow. It all depends on frame of reference.
I suck at explaining things, this video might do a better job at getting the idea across.
Thank you kindly! :D
Damn no one has corrected you in 10 minutes. That’s pretty good!
I fully expect to come back to lemmy in 48 hours to find a fascinatingly detailed and viciously incisive rebuttal that calls me at least three slurs in the first paragraph, sprinkles additional passive aggressive repudiations of my character throughout, and finishes with a tactical f-bomb too :D
I’ve got 7 hours left at work I’ll drum something up for you…
How else are we supposed to learn things?!
I still look up whenever u hear a plane fly over. Heavier than air travel is treated way to casually
It’s simple. You just need 60 tons of lift and thrust. Aerodynamics help but you can make a brick fly.
see: The US Space Shuttle program
An a380 is so big when it takes off it looks like it’s moving slow, just kind of hanging in the air
Dude, the first time I saw a C5 Galaxy take off I was amazed at how slowly it was moving. It’s like what I thought I knew about physics was just wrong, it was so cool.
In much the same way that bricks don’t
