What the argument about a plane on a conveyor belt says about Americans

So, the original post has been long deleted. No wonder, the replies had turned nasty. What had started as a debate on whether a plane could take off had descended into name calling and worse.

If you want to know the answer, skip down to the bottom. Because the issue here is not about whether a conveyor belt can keep an airplane from taking off. It is about the way people are willing to defend a view even when they don’t have a shred of evidence to support it.

I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so. - Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw)

And apparently this quote from 1874 proves that this isn’t a recent problem.

For those that don’t know, I wrote a book called “Fixing America: An Engineer’s Solutions to our Social, Cultural, and Political Problems”. The book was a three year research effort into problems that we are ignoring as we squabble over culture war issues. And what amazed me was how much I thought was true and turned out to not be. In writing the book, I kept an open mind, went to original sources and dug deep into the history and the gigabytes of data for the subjects to try and learn what the core issues were.

And in the process I managed to offend both the far right and far left. As one reviewer of Fixing America said - “Taggart doesn’t pick sides like most pundits. He calls out the nonsense wherever it comes from—left, right, or that confusing middle ground. A bipartisan roast? Absolutely. Grab some popcorn.”

But the core tenant of the book was to let the history and data take me wherever they led. And in some cases the beliefs I had taught been were completely wrong.

And that is where a controversial, but simple question like a plane on a giant conveyor belt spilts Americans. Because while we think we are all open minded, logical people, the truth is just the opposite. People believe in something and will defend it vehemently, even to the point of attacking anyone that disagrees, without any supporting evidence.

Airline pilots, engineers, and others tried to patiently explain and were verbally attacked by people who had no technical training. People that worked in industries as far from aerospace as you could possibly imagine and yet, they insisted that they were right and resorted to personal attacks. And the other side wasn’t without fault, as the responses grew more outrageous, the airline pilots and engineers responded with just as much heat. Until finally someone just deleted the entire post.

A person defending a ludicrous statement isn’t new. People to this day claim the Earth is flat after Greek mathematician Eratosthenes not only proved it was round in 240 BC, but calculated the circumference with pretty amazing accuracy. But social media has given that person the ability to find like minded people and to feel secure in their defense of an idea that they really have no expertise in.

And this is the danger. Tom Nichols wrote a book “The Death of Expertise” where he looked at this. Originally written in 2017, with a new update being released this year, Nichols shows how we are so bombarded with information on the internet that people now have a hard time knowing what is true and what is propaganda and inevitably many go down the wrong path. Flat Earthers now produce slick videos proclaiming how they are right and every globe depicting the Earth is wrong. While at the same time you can watch a live feed from the International Space Station (link).

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We are flooded with graphs and stats that are not rooted in reality and in other cases twisted to skew the information. A slick graphic showing something that resonates with a person’s views is quickly liked and reposted sending it into other people’s feeds and inbox, without ever being checked. And they will assume it to be true and defend it with determination as if their children’s future depended on it.

What do we do in the face of such resolution coupled with an ignorance of reality? Delete all the posts? Block all the people that we “think” are wrong, when we might actually be wrong. Withdraw into our “trusted” media bubbles where we are fed our own views backed up with pretty graphics.

That is the worst danger, because that is what we have done.

We now live in media bubbles where we rarely hear any view point that differs from our own except in a mocking take down by someone we agree with.

It is now critical that we break our media bubbles. That we listen to what other people are saying. That we have the discussions with people that some are calling our enemies hoping we won’t find common ground with our fellow Americans. And that we spend the time to check it, verify it, and listen to the experts, before we send some cute meme virally through the internet.

For those that skipped down - here is the answer to airplane on a conveyor belt.

So, in engineering there is what is called a Free Body Diagram where you take an object, in this case the plane, and you draw all the forces acting on it to determine what the plane will do. (It is also called a Force Diagram and if you want to learn more about it here is the Wikipedia link.)

So, what are the forces acting on the plane-

• Thrust of the engines, whether it’s a jet or propeller driven, they both are pushing air away from the airplane to generate forward thrust.

• Weight of the plane acting downwards due to gravity. While the plane is on the runway, the runway supports the plane against gravity.

• Air resistance as the plane moves forward pushing the air aside. Air resistance increases with velocity squared, starting off it is negligible.

• Lift force generated by the air flowing over the wings. The whole goal is to get enough airflow across the wing to generate lift to overcome the force of gravity.

• And lastly you have the rolling resistance of the wheels, and this is where people make the key mistake, because the wheels are connected to the plane by axle bearings and they turn freely. So even though the conveyer belt is moving opposite to the plane, the rolling resistance is a very small force.

Where people get tripped up is in how the problem is phrased. It is the statement “the conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction.” So, a lot of people think that means the plane can’t move forward. But the rolling resistance generated by the wheels is nothing compared to the thrust of the engines, so the plane accelerates forward and the wheels just spin faster.

People need to realize that the conveyer belt is only acting to spin the wheels faster and not in preventing the plane from moving. So the plane accelerates down the runway, whether it is on a conveyor belt or on plain concrete.

If you don’t believe me, here is Adam Savage from the Mythbusters, explaining when they actually did a full scale test and proved, that the plane takes off.