Can a Plane on a Treadmill Take Off?

"cjcampbell" wrote in message
oups.com...
Saw this question on "The Straight Dope" and I thought it was amusing.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/060203.html

The question goes like this:

"An airplane on a runway sits on a conveyer belt that moves in the
opposite direction at exactly the speed that the airplane is moving
forward. Does the airplane take off?" (Assuming the tires hold out, of
course.)

Cecil Adams (world's smartest human being) says that it will take off
normally.


When this question was raised on Sci.aeronautics it lasted 14 replies, (as
archived by Google groups, but I think that some other posts were dropped by
the news servers.)

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.aeronautics/browse_thread/thread/e344b133e57880a0/57a2a6789dd92bf6?lnk=st&q=(treadmill)+group%3Asci. aeronautics&rnum=1&hl=en#57a2a6789dd92bf6

One of the posters raised the issue of what would happen when the aircraft
returned for landing.

we are up to about 110 replies here on r.a.s, r.a.p.

A similar question was posed in the Airliners.net forums, what a great
discussion it was! See he
http://www.airliners.net/discussions...d.main/136068/ over
400 replies!

I am quite surprised that this question has received the amount of
consideration that it has. Must be a slow news month or maybe is an
indication that there are more people thinking about flying than there are
actually doing it.