Accurate plane performace?

Peter Duniho wrote:

[confused stuff on weight snipped]

Sorry, but you are confusing mass and weight. There is no such thing as
weight. Weight is a nebulous term that non-physicists use to describe
gravitational attraction between two bodies, or so it seems to me.

A body has mass and velocity; that's all it has, it doesn't have weight. No
reflection on PD, since we all did different things at school, but this is
plain-vanilla high-school physics.

A satellite has no weight in orbit; it has mass and velocity (and therefore
momentum). The reason it doesn't fly off on a tangent is because of the
gravitational attraction between the mass of the Earth and the mass of the
satellite, exactly counter-balancing the satellite's momentum which would
act to keep it going in a straight line.

Similarly, in the Vomit Comet it is not weight that is attracting the people
towards the ground, it is the gravitational attraction between the mass of
the Earth and the mass of the people.

--
Nick