How Do We Ever Make It To Europe?

If you throw a rock straight up in the air and close your eyes....how come it hits you in the head instead of coming down on the other side of the yard?

The Earth and the airplane rotate relative to the sun, but Earth does not rotate relative to the airplane. Its all about frames of reference.

I use frequent flyer miles.

It's magic.

Smoke and mirrors. Don't believe otherwise. Newton X 3, Bernoulli X 1, and LWTD have nothing to do with it.

You figured it out. Europe is actually a giant movie set created by NASA. It's really just outside Plano, so you may think you've flown thousands of miles but you haven't. Shhhh...

Lamont, Perhaps it has something to do with the Coriolis Effect? The earth only makes one rotation per day (hence the slow transition from day to night) and aircraft can travel faster than this rotation. This would explain the crossing of time zones, and the fact that one generally arrives in Europe the day after departing North America if travelling east, and the same day if travelling west. I'm not sure of the exact answer to your question, but suspect this may be part of the answer. Cheers!

It it is a serious question and really don't understand it, remember the air mass that the plane is flying in is also moving with the rotation. And most importantly, the speed of the airplane is relative to the ground. And most Europe flight patterns follow the great circle route (shortest distance) and fly closer to the North Polo than direct east/west routes. Someone must have skipped eighth grade geography.

We do not sense the rotation of the earth as movement any more than we feel upside-down in Australia. The speed of the airplane is relative to the ground.

It's God's wondrous works.

Okay, I'll bite in case it's a real question. Go back to my first post - - it all has to do with gravity. Water, air (atomsphere), and an airborne flying machine are all pulled to the center of the earth by gravity. Picture a hovering helicopter - - it's just sitting in a stationary position above the ground, the dirt isn't skipping along underneath it. Atmosphere moving with the rotation of the earth is doing the same thing. Continental and maritime high and lows (the prevailing biggies, not the little things the weather guy talks about) create what we call winds. They're caused by differential heating - - air moving across the surface of the earth is called wind - - on the surface these move from a high to a low - - at altitude there's a corresponding wind in the opposite direction. These winds (and similar water currents) are slightly influenced by the coreollis effect. Neither of these are very important compared to the rotational speed of the earth - - the jet stream doesn't often get much above eighty knots at flying altitude and open-ocean currents don't get much above seven. An aircrat uses lift to overcome weight (gravity) and thrust to overcome drag which creates forward motion and allows it to move through the atmosphere - - it's moving through the rotating atmosphere but at an apparent surface speed which is a factor of airspeed and tail/head wind. Gravity. Toss a rock in the air ......

It was thinking about weird stuff like this that made Einstein famous. But Tom has the right answer. It's all about frames of reference ... the earth does not rotate relative to the plane. But it gets a bit more complicated when you start to factor in the effects of wind speed.

"We do not sense the rotation of the earth as movement...." That is, unless you have had one too many tequilas, because my bed seemed to be rotating pretty fast.

Michael 1, "That is, unless you have had one too many tequilas, because my bed seemed to be rotating pretty fast." I noticed that same effect with Ouzo in Greece last year. I'll have to study this phenomenon further, as I may be on the verge of a great scientific breakthrough!

Australians are not upside-down. The maps are.

Ahhh the joy of relativity...lol.... and to take your train of thought further, since the earth is orbiting the sun at approximately 30 Kms/second, how come you, me, our computers, carry on bags, guidebooks, Rick, and everyone reading this post, don't just get blown off the face of the earth? Hmmmm? Wha?...Huh?.... lol...it's because we and everything around us are travelling at that speed, so from a relativistic perspective we don't notice....
How's this for a brain buster....when you fly somewhere, time actually slows down compared to if you stayed home and sat in a chair... Einstein showed that the passage of time is a relative thing, and as we move faster time actually slows down when compared to someone who isn't moving...so there is some scientific truth to the idea that travelling makes us younger....if only from a relative perspective..lol

Einstein showed that the passage of time is a relative thing, and as we move faster time actually slows down when compared to someone who isn't moving...so there is some scientific truth to the idea that travelling makes us younger....if only from a relative perspective..lol I guess the opposite is true as well. As I'm getting older, I'm getting slower, but time seems to be going faster.

If you really want to get confusing, how about the one regarding the relative speed of light if you're traveling next to and in the same direction as a light beam?

The water goes down the drain hole in a different direction down here!!!!!

And flying west to east there is usually a tail-wind, with a head-wind flying the opposite direction.

Not only is the world flat, it's just 6000 years old according to tea baggers like Michelle Bachmann. And people like Isaac Newton should have burned at the stake for their heresy (or at least tea-bagged).

@ Judy http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2008/04/06/myth-3-does-water-swirl-counter-clockwise-in-the-southern-hemisphere/

Judy, water goes in the same direction in the drain "up" here. It goes DOWN :-)

I did this last summer. I rented a helicopter and flew staight up and hovered there for 6 hours then I came down and founf myself in Paris...simple amazing

There's a great idea in this helicopter thing...any investors for a new business?

Pilots are clever. They know what buttons to push to get the airplane to fly from one place to another. None of us regular people could ever do this. In fact, we couldn't even start an engine. Airline pilots are a rare breed. They may sleep on a couch between shifts, but they are able to make an airplane shoot into the sky, fly straight and level from one airport to another, and land safely and smoothly. Navigation is interesting. There is never a straight line from one airport to another, there are "waypoints" where the course is adjusted. You can be standing in the back of an airplane and suddenly the wing lifts up and the airplane turns, and then the wing will go back to level again. This is the computer turning the airplane over a waypoint. A waypoint is an artificial point on the map that act as navigation points. This document has a good diagram of how it works: http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/ND/8260.44A%20Chg1.pdf

The helicopter idea won't work and Richard is a frapping liar. Hover: To maintain a helicopter in a stationary postion above the surface of the earth. Tolerance: Three centimeters laterally, two centimeters vertically. Performed by: Men and women of astounding good looks, exeptional eye-hand coordination, and supreme self-confidence. Source: Ed'sBigGoldenBookofFlying with footnotes and annotations by the author. Best Selling Status: Not so red-hot and there are still short people that need to go to college. Donations: Accepted. Edit: You can't sit around pushing buttons when things come uncglued, you've got to hand-fly the sucker, just like in the days before autopilots and computers - - witness the developing evidence in the one that went in the drink off of Brazil. The link above covers only the rnav depature procedures which is over ten minutes into the flight.

In simple layman's terms, when the plane is sitting on the runway in Orlando, it is already going 500 mph (or however fast the earth moves in Orlando). So when it takes off and is flying at 500 mph (in relation to the ground) you can essentially say it is going 1000 mph - the 500 mph it would be going if standing still PLUS the 500 mph from its own propulsion. So as it has been mentioned, the plane's speed is measured relative to the ground (which is going 500 mph on its own) while the Earth's speed is measured relative to no movement.

Huh? What if it's going the other way.... it wouldn't move , just hover over Orlando. And what about if it were going north or south? The rotation of the earth has nothing to do with it. The whole mess is rotating together and the aircraft's motion is relative to the surface of the earth.

No Boeing or Airbus commercial passenger aircraft goes 1000 mph, not in terms of airspeed or groundspeed, anyway.
But airplane speed is complicated: not only are there airspeed and groundspeed, but all sorts of other speeds (Ed will provide the details). As the OP said: How do we ever make it to Europe? Maybe we don't. The most likely theory has already been proposed: Paris is an elaborate construct located somewhere east of Corsicana, TX (some say just east of Gun Barrel City, TX).

True airspeed, calibrated airspeed, indicated airpeed, mach number, ground speed.....that's it......they have no relevance except to the duration of the flight and ground speed trumps all.

A term has been used here that may be unfamiliar to some: "indicated airpeed." This is defined as the speed of, well, you know, when you utilize the facilities in a moving airplane, your body is moving at the same speed as the aircraft, relative to the ground, and the speed of...oh, forget it.

@Kent... so you mean to tell me I was not hallucinating while I was driving around Texas in the middle of the night? I might have really seen the Eiffel Tower off in the distance???

@ Terry kathyrn: It could have been La Tour, but it depends on whether you were on certain meds at the time. But what I can tell you for sure is that the guys you saw in berets (toting assault rifles) were not Parisians or Special Forces, but rather Texans with a strong belief in the Second Amendment. This may be why they call it Gun Barrel City, TX.

I feel like this conversation should be had in an Amsterdam coffeehouse.

Am I the only one confused..? I thought we were in a coffeehouse in Amsterdam. Just a little silliness amidst our earthshaking, and ever so relevant questions, answers and objective opinions about travel!

I'm so darn confused I don't even know for sure anymore how the earth and airplanes work - - and I've had a masters in geography for almost fifty years and been mucking about in flying machines for a bit more. However, since the earth's diameter is something like twenty-five thousand miles, that makes the diameter about eight grand. I'm tossing my piggy bank at tunneling machines.

Ed, there's more history than there used to be, but I don't know about geography. Maybe this will shed a little light on it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY

The realities in which the plane arrives in Europe and doesn't arrive in Europe exist simultaneously until you open the box to check...oops! Wrong problem:)

Well, what about the other burning question: if I'm in the front of an airplane going 600mph and I jump up in the air, how come I don't go flying to the back of the plane? Huh? HUH????

Well, there are situations where rotational direction and speed matter, but it's in ballistics. We locate missile launch sites as close to the equator as possible, and launch towards the east to add the rotational momentum to the launch vehicle. On large guns (not a 155-175mm howitzer or smaller, but the immense German guns on the first and second wars, as in the Paris and Gustav guns) aiming the gun to the west resulted in a projectile falling short of it's aimed point by several thousand yards as the earth had moved beneath the projectile. It's an interesting math problem to tackle. The problem we are discussing is much simpler than that faced by battle ships, which had to calculate trajectories with two objects moving at different speeds and directions. Prior to the simple computers installed aboard the Iowa class ships, mass calculations of possible combinations were completed by teams of women, who were expert at mathematics and had greater concentration than men who tried it. The resulting table books were essential to accurate gunnery.

'.........launch towards the east to add the rotational momentum to the launch vehicle' Most satellites are launched from Vandeburg AFB toward the west. Launches go toward the unpopulated water since sometimes they make a mess.

Thanks for all of the helpful and often humorous replies. I'm not sure I understand the situation any better now, so I'll just take it on faith that a plane can get to Europe and back. Also, if Rick Steves ever sponsors a travel comedy tour, I hope he chooses some of the Helpline regulars to headline. Maybe someone can top Seinfeld's: "What's the deal with airplane peanuts?"

Ed, where's the populated water?

Atlantis, right at the nude beach.

I am utterly confused and entertained reading this post.
When you take a step when walking in the direction of east, you are that much closer to your target regardless of the earth's rotation. So, the same applies to the plane traveling, right? It just happens to be doing it without contact to Earth. Makes you respect the mathematical/engineering mind.

'When you take a step when walking in the direction of east, you are that much closer to your target regardless of the earth's rotation.' Maryam, you have a clear misundertanding of what's involved. What if the destination is to the west? Huh? Huh? Huh? :)

I suppose you are not doubly closer, so there! I can't even deny or defend whether I misunderstand, since I don't think I clearly understand to begin with. No more questions that make me sound silly. Does anyone want to know whether to buy a Paris Museum Pass?

I am in the Middle East. So whichever direction I walk, I am walking east, right?

Ed: yes, most Vandenberg launches are high trajectory to the was, and a few to the south for circumpolar orbits. t. However, they lose the momentum indicated in my post. The choice of Cape Kennedy, and of Guyana for the Ariane rockets, is based on the added launch momentum. The (bust) Boeing floating launch platform, to be towed to the equator for ocean launches, was based on the same fact.