It's crazy that a 60 ton metal airplane can just fly

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...
  
  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.
- Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
  
  tomato tomato =P
- 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.
- or magnets!

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
- Some lady told me she read Atlas Shrugged while in the hospital for a long stay, kept alive by equipment she neither invented nor paid for. How oblivious people can be when we are all just barely something more than monkeys? Some of us manage to be passably unoblivious and I think that's what makes us human; the potential to be more rational than a monkey. It's no guarantee, though, as you so noted. You know there was a caveperson who just learned about fire and still went around and acted like he invented it straight up to the caveperson that did invent it. Monkey brain stuff.
- 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.
- 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".

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.
- 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?

Don't forget how high you get.
- Last time I flew I didn't get high at all. I must be doing something wrong.
  
  Don't you need to actually inhale?
  
  And the one before?
- 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.

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

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?
- WhhaaahhhHH!!!
- And will it fly higher if we have the Faith of the Heart?
- easier yet, if everyone crams to the tail, it will likely crash

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
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruyfJJT7qY
  
  https://youtu.be/huumFm2lnxI?si=hUm0iBSD_CepHG8C

"It's just always exciting! That amazing moment when twelve tonnes of metal leaves the earth... and no-one knows why!"
"Yes, we do."
"Yeah, but, you know, not really. I mean, we know you need wings, and engines, and a sticky-up bit on the end for some reason, but it's not like we actually know why a plane stays in the air."
"No. No, Arthur, we really do! We- we do, we do know that!"
- I don't know why but I thought that said "Archie" instead of "Arthur", and read that as Archie and Edith Bunker....and it kind of worked. From the later seasons, when Edith was getting sick of his shit.
- Fucking magnets, how do they work?

I find it equally neat how displacement allows a 100,000 ton ship to float.
As I'm sure most know, planes fly because of the angle of their wings and airframe shape (also known as an airfoil). As moving air flows over the wing it creates downward pressure, which, as a result of Newton's 3rd law (reaction to a force), allows moving air below to create lift. And upsy daisy she goes.
Science.
- That lift explanation is innacurate/incomplete. While there may be some equal and opposite forces depending on the angle of attack, the primary reason for lift is due to Bernoulli's Principle. Airfoils have a rounded upper surface with a longer path for air to take, relative to the underside. This requires air to move at a higher velocity over the top, and since A1 x V1 x P1 = A2 x V2 x P2, pressure over the airfoil decreases. It is this pressure differential that creates lift.
  In regards to aircraft, Newton's third law of motion applies to thrust from a propeller or jet engine.
  
  Bernoulli's explanation and Newton's explanation are the same explanation made from different frames of reference. They're equal, I don't understand why people insist that one or the other is incomplete or that they somehow both have different contributions to an airplane's flight. They're the same. The airplane flies because the air pushes it up turning some of the energy from its substantial forward movement through said air into enough upward acceleration to counteract gravity. That happens both due to pressure differential AND the sum of the deflection of air in exactly the same measure, they are directly linked and have to be equal. Bernoulli's explanation is one particularly nuanced and clever way of looking at and understanding the exact mechanics of how that happens and if you plug the resulting values into Newton's math it matches perfectly. The zero "angle of attack" for a cambered airfoil shape is actually measured this way not by measuring the angles of the physical surfaces or anything like that. The Newtonian explanation is just another way of looking at it. Either way it requires intense computations to come to exact numbers, but the numbers are the same either way. The pressure differential of the air IS the mechanical force of the air, happening as an equal and opposite direction to the deflection of the volume of air the plane is flying through, either of which is what we call lift. They're all the same thing, happening at the same time and yes you can look at them from different perspectives but that doesn't mean one perspective is wrong and the other is right. They're all accurately describing the same thing. It is useful to know both, but not necessary and it does not make either of them incorrect.
  This discussion always reminds me of the "airplane on a treadmill" argument where both sides read the premise differently and scream at each other that only their way of interpreting the question is right.
  
  Yah, that's correct. I was trying to give the most simplified version, without getting into conservation of energy in a fluid.
  Now I'm annoyed with myself for not explaining it further. You did a great job tho.
  
  You don't need rounded wings to fly though and how are (some) planes able to fly upside down if that is the main explanation of lift?

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...)
  
  Ton (imperial) is 2000lb vs tonne (metric)
  
  Don't get them going about their crazy units!

An a380 is so big when it takes off it looks like it's moving slow, just kind of hanging in the air
- In much the same way that bricks don't
- 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.

Glitch that's going to be patched out eventually
- Now there's another shower thought.
  What if one day airplanes just like...stopped working...
  
  So there’s this neat thing in quantum mechanics where the state of something could change to a more stable state in what is known as false vacuum decay.
  Then it causes everything else of the same type to decay/collapse to the more stable state in a wave travelling in every direction at nearly the speed of light.
  Such an event could rewrite fundamental forces of the universe and… one day planes just stop working.
  Probably other bad stuff happens as well like our cells stop working and we all die.

"I flew for my first time on a plane"
Now I just feel old.
- I didn't fly on a plane until i was nearly 30. Dont know if you are in the US, but outside of the US, it's less common to fly anywhere. high speed rail between countries in europe, UK is small enough to drive anywhere, boats and eurostar train to get from UK to Europe. Euro tunnel if you want to take your car to europe.
  
  Or if you're just poor too! My parents are near retirement age and taking their first vacation by plane next month.

I'm even more impressed by aircraft carriers. Just one of those things weigh as much as 250 fully loaded Boeing 747s. And it just floats. :)

- Dafuq is this!? Stress testing?
  
  Basically. The wings have to be able to bend that much so they don’t break off in strong winds or hard maneuvers.
  
  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.

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

Crazier still when you consider it's pushed into the sky by its own farts.
- Not very accurate. Can't appreciate your comment as much as I would like to be able to
  
  Well it's a lot of hot gas shooting out the back that pushes it forward. Would you like beans in the fuel for a true fart?

Turns out, the sky is pretty thick if you hit it hard enough.
- Induced viscosity.

The 777 is 375-ish tons, and the A380 is 630-ish tons.

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't flying, it's achieving escape velocity.

it's crazy that you can just jump, and you go up for a bit.

Crazier to think 60tons of air being pushed down 10m/s^2 (or whatever equivalent mass/acc you want to think with) to keep it up there.

I still look up whenever u hear a plane fly over. Heavier than air travel is treated way to casually

I think you just experienced physics first hand!
- Amateur. I've been experiencing physics for nearly 14 billion years.
  
  Have you? Is math real or is it a human construct?

It doesn't just fly, it rages against gravity, using every possible trick in the book

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.

boy do I agree.
I fly a lot, and I think about this a lot. it's absolutely nuts.
I saw a diagram once explaining how planes fly, this is a good explanation of that:
"Airplane wings are shaped to make air move faster over the top of the wing. When air moves faster, the pressure of the air decreases. So the pressure on the top of the wing is less than the pressure on the bottom of the wing. The difference in pressure creates a force on the wing that lifts the wing up into the air."
so that's floating around the back of my mind while I sit in my air chair and think:
"and there we are.
We are climbing into the air again in the big flexible metal tube.
The wings have flex and they almost look like they are flapping in the wind right there.
well, this is crazy again"
approximates my thought process each time I fly.
- Yeah that's mostly bullshit.
  Your arm flies when you stick it out a window, and it isn't shaped like shit, so does a piece of paper.
  It's basically like a sail, but horizontally instead of vertically, the onrushing air hits the bottom at an angle, is deflected down, and bumps the wing up.
  The rest is just to try to reduce drag on the top (super-critical wings attempting to maximize laminar flow, or at least make the disconnection as far back as possible so turbulence creates the least drag on the wing.
  
  I'm partial to the Newtonian explanation myself, I was explaining my interest the first time I saw an illustration of the Bernoulli principle.
  in fact, I just wrote about The Newtonian explanation a few minutes ago:
  "the Newtonian makes more practical end complete sense to me sense to me as an explanation for a lift.
  maybe the confusion comes from calling the motion of pushing air down "lift"
  push-off.
  hm. what the heck is an appropriate antonym for lift...
  spring-hold.
  oh, buoyancy?
  maybe we should switch our talk from lift to buoyancy.
  rather than generating lift, velocity through the air generates aerodynamic buoyancy due to the increase in downward pressure, or rather the compressed air beneath the airfoil."
- If flying is crazy, then by the logic explained here today, controlled landings are even crazier.
  
  I personally think rising is more impressive and spectacular than falling.
- Wait until you find out that probably wrong.
  Its what we assumed for the last 100 odd years, but apparently in the last few we discovered they don't actually work like that.
  
  oh, go on.
  i haven't heard of the updated dynamics of flight.

It’s magical, right? It’s what got me interested in aviation - the physics, the science, the engineering to make it work. And we’ve gotten so good at it, air travel is now available to most people, it’s safe and convenient.
I’ve flown exactly three times in my life: a hot air balloon, a helicopter and a DC3. Each was magical in its own way. I’ve also done a fair bit of plane spotting. Seeing an Airbus A380 landing right in front of you is amazing. It really is the size of a large apartment block with wings. Truly awe inspiring.
Aviation is fucking awesome!
- You've flown or you've flown in? Presumable the former, but I know people from where I'm from use flown to mean flown in. If you've only been airborne three times, and all in separate crafts, that's something special in and of itself.
  
  Flown in, as a passenger. I’d have said ‘piloted’ if I was the pilot.
  And yes, that’s an odd trio of aircraft, considering most people only really fly on airliners. I’ve been on a Boeing 747 in a museum, but have never flown in an airliner.
- I've only been in a helicopter once, but that was the coolest. Parasailing being pulled by a boat was also very fun.
  
  I really enjoyed my helicopter ride as well - a sightseeing flight on vacation. That was on a Schweitzer S300; a small helicopter with a bench seat in the front. So you’re sitting right next to the pilot with an almost unobstructed forward vision. So cool. Definitely not something for people with a fear of heights.

More cool detail about a modern jet airliner than you thought imaginable all delivered in a cool 3D animation.
https://youtu.be/NZLbTuBDhJg?si=mdgytNATo5Tz9ltx

Wait till you discover about the concorde!
- explodes

that and about 223,378 pounds of jet fuel then it flies
https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?specid=1699
- Steel beams are not gonna melt themselves.
  
  steel beams don't need to reach their melting point to deform and fail under structural stress

I am a avgeek (aviation) and I love all things planes. Got my PPL and made it halfway through instrument before bailing but damn it, flying is the best thing in the world and aviation itself is absolutely fucking beautiful.
- Take up paragliding. Highly recommend (unless you have an addictive personality, social commitments, other hobbies, etc).

Due to the nature of my work I've flown hundreds of passenger flights of all sizes and I still find myself in awe.
What a privilege to be able to actually see down from such a range of heights too. Where there is still lots of detail to be found, but you can also get an appreciation of scale. It's honestly really amazing.

My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.
The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don't see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn't static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn't move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn't as I imagined, at those speeds it's more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.
So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.
The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it's more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it's pretty much a bus.
- Do you appreciate the company name Airbus because of this experience?
  I think I would.
  I think it would just make me smirk a little bit at myself whenever i remembered both of them at the same time
- In the air shows around here, they used to have a semi truck with some rockets strapped to the back that they'd race against a fighter jet.
  The jet would come in low and when it crossed the starting line, the truck would take off from it.
  The truck usually won.
  Air shows might be big oil and military propaganda (that truck was owned and sponsored by Shell, iirc)...but damn if it wasn't cool as hell.
  
  I went to my second monster truck show a couple years ago. Took my nephew with me. The first time I was a kid and we had to leave because the noise made my bitch ass little brother cry.
  They've come so far! They're doing front flips now in those trucks! Highly recommend it for anyone. I was 39 at the time and I loved every minute.

Wait until you find out how far off you are at 60 ton....
- 737-Max10 has a max take off weight of 101 tons....damn
  
  640 tons for the An-225
  
  Don't quote me- 747 max fuel of ~150 ton.
  Cargo can carry just shy of 129t....

Relevant Louis CK video.
https://youtu.be/PdFB7q89_3U?si=QUrz5uDVppib6gSm

They put quite a lot of fuel in them; there is a lot of energy in fuel.

you want to really bend your brain about airplanes, go looknhow the air conditioning on a big jet works. the phrase "air pack" will help in your search. I don't know which is more impressive, that it actually works or that someone thought of it.

In fitting natural conditions your house can fly too, just not whole and not for long
I mean, it's crazy, but I'm more fascinated with smaller airplanes. Imagine it, you can make something like a Piper Cub almost as easy\hard as 1000 years ago it was to make a good hauberk.
And for those mentioning computers - my feeling is the same about computers. It's nice to have a laptop with Linux or FreeBSD (not counting corporate malware), but a machine much simpler, but one that can be produced entirely in an area of 10mln people, full chain, would be much cooler for me.
I'm in awe of distributed production lines being possible and allowed by today's machinery.
I think that is something we have to rediscover. Centralization is stifling humanity's advancement. At the same time in the real world rather unpleasant people's power depends on it, so it won't be quick or easy. But I think it is happening anyway, just very slowly. Evolution, not revolution. Surely I would be glad for it to be a revolution, to see it as a (yet) young person.
- Not possible.
  Most manufacturing of things like computer chips (just the chips themselves) require raw materials from all over the world. You can't just use any sand. 10M people is just a little more than the population of NYC.
  
  I would like us to be trying to change that and not to make things more and more centralized. Because that kind of civilization will fail.

The wings are crazy ! They look way too flimsy for what they do.
Next time you see an airplane, imagine a crane picking it up by the wings, around the middle of the wing length, and then start shaking it up.
It does not look like the wing will be able to hold that much weight.

Its all in those powerful engines
- Not really. The thrust those engines produce is only about 1/3 the weight of the aircraft. It's in part thanks to the engines for sure though.
  
  You make it sound like 1/3 is a small number. That's enough to accelerate the plane quickly and the speed is what generates lift.

It gets even crazier if you think about planes as flying metal sausages with wings.

It's mostly thanks to the Wright brothers too, damn, that's impressive beyond words.

- Bernoulli's principle is certainly involved, but the full explanation is more complicated and arguably beyond high school level:
  Although the two simple Bernoulli-based explanations above are incorrect, there is nothing incorrect about Bernoulli's principle or the fact that the air goes faster on the top of the wing, and Bernoulli's principle can be used correctly as part of a more complicated explanation of lift.
- Keep this handy for this situation.... https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/wrong1.html
  See #3. Wings are not constrictions in a tube.
  
  From your source:
  {The upper flow is faster and from Bernoulli's equation the pressure is lower. The difference in pressure across the airfoil produces the lift.} As we have seen in Experiment #1, this part of the theory is correct.
  Sure, it might be more complicated and there are other forces at play. Also, top and bottom air molecules may not reach the backside of an airfoil at the exact same time, but that doesn't diminish the effects of this pressure differential on lifting force.

Okay, now let's discuss flat earthers and the price for a moon ticket. We don't need to include the space suite.

Uh huh. Did you start to believe the earth is round while you were up there too?