Quote:
Originally posted by NY Madman:
Thrust alone is not enough to achieve viable flight. If it were, aircraft carriers would never need their catapults. Without the additional forward motion provided by the catapults, every plane would crash leaving a carrier, regardless of the amount of thrust it's engines put out.
You're right. Viable flight requires both thrust and lift. A catapult merely provides forward acceleration that adds to the thrust produced by the engines of the aircraft. And yes, because aircraft carriers aren't very long, just about any plane that does not use a catapult would just fall off the bow of the carrier because it didn't achieve enough airspeed to take off.

The hypothetical scenario only says that the conveyor has a mechanism to track the plane's speed, but it does not make any mention of whether it's airspeed or groundspeed. We assume it must be groundspeed, because a conveyor belt has no effect on air.

The only way a plane on such a conveyor would NOT take off is if it had a tailwind that equaled the thrust from the engines.
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