Will a plane take off from a conveyor belt?

Here's the scenario...

An airplane is on a conveyor. The conveyor is set to match the speed of the airplane in the backwards direction. However fast the plane moves, the conveyor moves just as fast.

Can the plane take off?

 

Not sure if this belongs here, but you've interested me.

I don't think it would. Planes fly because of the lift on the wings. If it's relative location and motion is zero, there's going to be no air moving under the wings so no lift. There's a better way to describe this using real physics terms but I pretty much slept through that class.

 

I think Dajuan is right. However, if you could find a huge fan you might get a different story.

 

I think the question should be, will a conveyor belt run with an airplane on it?

 

Hehe, either that or it was just a really badly designed airport.

 

The plane requires lift which is created by the plane building up speed before it lifts off. It would not be able to take off as Dajuan and Sabine mentioned in their
posts.

 

. Apparenlty it does fly
Part #2


It was an interesting argument, but as things progressed, more rational heads prevailed, pointing out that the airplanes do not apply their thrust via their wheels, so the conveyor belt is irrelevant to whether the airplane will takeoff. One guy even got one of those rubber band powered wood and plastic airplane that sell for about a buck, put it on the treadmill someone foolishly donated to the Lounge years ago, thinking that pilots might actually exercise. He wound up the rubber band, set the treadmill to be level, and at its highest speed. Then he simultaneously set the airplane on the treadmill and let the prop start to turn. It took off without moving the slightest bit backwards

 

then why don't they build airports with conveyor belts as runways?


also, your links are both the same, therefore I don't understand why it can generate the airflow required for takeoff

 

This discussion reminds me of that boat that we saw when I was in Düsseldorf Senny and how it got to where it was

 

Part #2 (fixed)

An interesting question/discussion. Like Jedi_Dajuan and others, I would have thought that the plane would not be able to take off as it wouldn't be able to gain any forward motion. But having read the article, particularly the second part, I see now that the plane would be able to gain forward motion even though the conveyor belt is moving the opposite direction. The key point to understand is that while the conveyor belt would cause the wheels to rotate in the opposite direction, the plane's propeller (or jets or whatever) pushing against air would still cause the plane to move forward as normal.