I just read on Boing Boing that mythbuster is going to use an actual airplane with a pilot (ultralight) to test this out. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/28/mythbusters-tackles.html
This was settled a long time ago, and the experiment was and is pointless. Why? The setup was always too vague from the very beginning. IF the intent of the 'riddle' was to use this 'magic runway' to COMPLETELY NEGATE the forward movement of the plane, then it would NOT take off. If the intent was to use this magic runway to merely IMPEDE its progress, then the plane WOULD take off. There never was any mystery about it. The fact that the plane takes off only means that they impeded its progress, but didn't negate it. We already knew what would happen, either way, rendering the effort pointless.
The point is that's it's impossible for conveyor to negate forward movement. It doesn't matter how fast it's moving.
I was wrong... eating crow as we speak. I thought the conveyor belt would stop the plane, and therefore it'd get no lift.
I just reread the thread title. And based on that, the setup was made pretty clear. The problem is that the original point of the theoretical question was pointless, as demonstrated by mythbusters and many other people, because unless the wheels come off the plane or something from spinning too fast, the conveyer belt's speed has absolutely nothing to do with the airplane's ability to move forward.
From the original post: This is not the circumstances that Mythbusters replicated. Rather, they created a conveyor moving @ a static, rather than a dynamic speed. The takeoff speed of the plane they tested was only 25 MPH. If they had created a conveyor that was able to dynamically "match" the planes wheel speed as it powered up, then I think the results may have been different.
Yep. I figured they would set it up like this, cause its obvious that a non-powered conveyor wouldnt have stopped the plane from moving forward, allowing air to generate lift.
I wish they would have tried to do something like this. The fact is, the plane still moved forward before taking off.....therefore, proving nothing.
The whole point of the riddle and the experiment rests on whether the conveyor belt will keep the plane from moving forward. Of course, if the plane doesn't move forward, it won't take off. As the multiple demonstrations in the program last night showed, a conveyor belt/treadmill has almost no effect on the planes forward movement. You could see from the test with the RC plane and the real plane that the movement of the conveyor belt didn't even noticeably slow the planes down, the exact result predicted by everyone who said the plane would take off. By the way, where's WWR? He started this thread and was definitely the most obnoxious of the no-flyers. I'm going to go out on a limb and make another prediction. He either never shows up in this thread again or refuses to accept the results of the experiment. He definitely comes across as a faith-based science kind of guy.
I mean, the plane still moved forward relative to the cones that were not on the conveyor belt. I would have been convinced if the plane did not move forward relative to the stationary cones and just lifted once it got to its needed speed but the experiment failed to do so. Forward movement relative to the stationary cones provided air to go past the wings providing lift. I thought mythbusters could have done a better job......MYTH UNDETERMINED
This is the riddle that WWR posted: It doesn't say anything about the plane staying stationary. The crux of it is that a conveyor belt does nothing to keep the plane stationary. I'm not debating that the plane won't lift without forward acceleration, but as long as the plane is powered by the engine to move forward, it takes the wheels out of the equation on it's forward acceleration. Therefore the plane would always move forward and fly.
