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.
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?
Ton (imperial) is 2000lb vs tonne (metric)
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.
Don’t get them going about their crazy units!
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.
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.
The 777 is 375-ish tons, and the A380 is 630-ish tons.
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.
I still look up whenever u hear a plane fly over. Heavier than air travel is treated way to casually
I think whoever doesn’t look up as they hear a plane or helicopter flying is insane. Ever since as a child I have looked up.
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.
Relevant Louis CK video.
It gets even crazier if you think about planes as flying metal sausages with wings.
Wait until you find out about electricity! 🤯
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!
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…
I think we’re doing pretty fucking well, all things considered.
Saw
this the other day, seems relevant to your commentengrave billions of arcane runes
Omg, you just made me love my job more.
Do you work in a fab? If so would love to know more about your work
Design, close to tape out now, but also post-silicon and bringup.
It’s fun as all fuck, never thought about it as incantations or runes, then the rock comes back and we cast spells to bring it to life I guess.
Takes a while but is just incredible.
Try 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
Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
tomato tomato =P
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
That’s an awesome analogy.
I would be equally amazed to see something denser than water swimming.
Mythbusters has an episode where they swim in non-newtonian fluid
Ok, you have my attention, going googling.
That was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wiYtoG9kZE
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.
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
Is this true? Sounds true but I feel like this should also be a test they do to ensure it doesn’t fail.
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!
