Even a being as mighty as the Living Tribunal could only muster a triple face-palm; and, even then, it would require a spare hand.
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I was really hoping he’d just roll it off the edge, fall straight downwards, then pull up at the last moment and fly across the city, trailing a line of washing that he snagged on the landing gear…
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As Mythbusters proved, the plane doesn’t need to be moving, relative to the ground, it just needs air moving over the wings. So, just tie it down, start up the motor, when you get airborne, have your buddy cut the cord. After all, what could go wrong?..
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I don’t think he has enough altitude…
edit: a friend of the family built his own unltralight aircraft. He was no amateur. He knew what he was doing but he made the mistake of hooking up his ailerons backwards so the first correction he made in roll caused him to land upside down.
Since then my dad and I incant: the aileron comes up to meet the stick when we go flying.
No matter how hard you try there will be too many silly mistakes in this aeroplane for it to be just chucked off that roof.
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a french/egyptain WWII refugee built a plane in the attic of our building. it’s now in the powerhouse museum, australia’s premier technology musuem.
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B-but there wouldn’t be any air moving over the wings if the airplane was tied in place. The propeller isn’t there to push air over the wings, its there to pull the aircraft forward.
No, the propeller fans the pilot.
Watch how the pilot starts to sweat when the propeller stops working.
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(This in relative ignorance)
Saw an ‘Air Disasters’ episode (or some such) where the airliner in question was reliant on airflow, in a significant part, from the propellers. Apparently it allowed the construction of shorter wings.
Obviously, when an engine fails, the show’s producers step in to gather the archive footage.
A bit of context for those not in the know. During WW2 there was a PoW camp at Colditz castle in Saxony which was reserved for ‘special’ prisoners who kept trying to escape. This problably sounded like a great idea to the German high command, but it effectively concentrated all of the escape-minded prisoners in one place.
One of many, many, escape attempts was the Colditz Cock, a glider built in a hidden loft space on the basis that if the Germans were looking for tunnels, then they’d never think of looking for a glider in an attic (which was true).
I know the original plan was to build a runway along the top of a roof using pre-built triangular sections, and to use a bath full of concrete to pull a launch cable to get it up to speed. The plan was to get two men out of the castle and to the other side of the river, but the war ended before anyone ever needed to test it (which was just as well, they needed a better launch system).
And that’s not even the craziest escape attempt from Colditz…
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I am disappoint.
Saw Glass in performance, live production, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, in St. Louis many years ago.
It was wonderful and surreal and confusing and wild.
I say this as a longtime real Philip Glass fan.
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That plane was still moving forward relative to the ground. And a plane that small and light doesn’t need all that much lift generated to get airborne to begin with.
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