xerj wrote:
I was talking about Coriolis effect with someone and he asked me about
planes against or with the earth's spin of around 1000mph at the equator. He
asked why this didn't benefit east to west plane travel timewise and hurt
west to east. I couldn't give him a straight answer, and felt like an idiot
when I said "it just doesn't".

What IS the straight answer? The dropping something in a moving vehicle
analogy doesn't work, does it? A plane has a method of acceleration, whereas
a passively dropped object doesn't.

Sometimes really simple questions can give you the worst time.

It does affect us to some degree. We refer to it as "prevailing winds".
Remember that we are sitting in air above the earth that is moving
(mostly ) with the earth so the difference would not be as great as
your friend may imagine. The difference between the two rates comes
from the friction between the winds and the earth.

-Robert