Dean Wilkinson wrote:

Its called parallax. Your motion, the motion of the plane, and the
background were in the right configuration so that the parallax made the
plane appear to be stationary when in fact it was not...



okay! This is clicking for me, even though I know it may just be another
way of saying "optical illusion". I read this page,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

and the concept makes sense to me (not to imply that most everyone
else's explanation didn't).

Debbie