According to the article I provided a link for, it is a piloted ultralight. The conveyer belt is a quarter mile long.Wonder how they kept it in budget?Best Regards, Donald T. :-waveFLYing? It's cool. Trillions of birds and insects can't be wrong.

The budget is pretty easy... they find someone with an ultralight and say "hey, you want to be on TV?" :)I think a lot of their problems lately have come from the fine folks at the insurance companies... they mention how they called and asked about certain things and they would no be covered. I'm already prepared to deal with the "no-fly" people's argument that the light weight of the ultralight somehow matters in the problem somehow. :) It will be interesting to see anyway! One ultralight, cleared for takeoff... treadmill one! :)

The guy on YouTube did another pretty good experiment:

Just bet my brother a 3 hour simming session versus free labor on a moving job for his company that it will take off...Best Regards, Donny :-waveFLYing? It's cool. Trillions of birds and insects can't be wrong.

Well, you win. I'll tell you, I've seen this question overanalyzed, I've overanalyzed it to death going back and forth and the one thing the mythbusters did with the car on the treadmill and putting it in nuetral and pushing it forward with little resistance clicked for me.So simple really and it's funny how your gut instinct makes you think it won't take off. That ultralight had no problem at all. Hopefully, this puts this discussion to rest.

>Well, you win. I'll tell you, I've seen this question>overanalyzed, I've overanalyzed it to death going back and>forth and the one thing the mythbusters did with the car on>the treadmill and putting it in nuetral and pushing it forward>with little resistance clicked for me.>>So simple really and it's funny how your gut instinct makes>you think it won't take off. That ultralight had no problem>at all. Hopefully, this puts this discussion to rest.It does for me, as I was one of the ones who thought it wouldn't take off, as did the pilot on the show! I do wish though they confirmed takeoff speed and distance to the control takeoff, that would settle if there was any resistance at all. As a practical use though it also confirms it wouldn't make runway sizes any smaller as some have eluded to, not so much here, but other places I have read on the WEB. So there really isn't any practical reason for doing this in the real world!

Simple engineering problem. I described the results way back early in the thread. There was never a question.The only thing I was confused about was why folks didn't read my analysis and agree. The only reason to continue to debate is if you don't believe in science.

Why would anybody even THINK that an aircraft couldn't take off from a moving belt. The engine's thrust is not in ANY way connected to the ground, so of course it will provide thrust and cause forward movement of the aircraft through the air, thus providing lift when the proper speed is achieved, no matter what the wheels were doing. The only exception would be if the wheels had a substantial amount of friction and caused drag, impeding forward motion, i.e. bad brakes or bearings, causing the plane to slow or move backwards with the belt. The only case were this myth would be true is if the aircraft got it's forward thrust through the wheels only, which wouldn't be very practical for flight.This is one of those old trick questions that physics professors used to ask a class. One example is the balloon in the car scenario. The question was what would happen to a balloon in a closed car that starts to move forward. Would the balloon move backwards as the car accelerated or would it hold still? Think about it. There are many influencing factors.Kim