Questions tagged [aviation]
Typically pertains to the study of aircraft. Can relate to the theories, design, construction, behavior and use of such craft.
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Does the "survivorship bias" airplane diagram come from World War II research on returning war planes?
This is a famous diagram. It is used extensively to demonstrate the concept of "Survivorship Bias".
Here is a typical example claim associated with this diagram:
In World War 2 the allies ...
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Did an AI-enabled drone attack the human operator in a simulation environment?
According to this news article on the Royal Aeronautical Society website:
...an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and
destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the ...
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Did one of the 9/11 hijackers use a Conch Republic passport to enter the United States?
I read:
Anderson, who resumed the running of the Conch Republic souvenir business and the official Conch Republic Days festival until his death in 2014, was subjected to an FBI inquiry after reports ...
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Is Elon Musk's jet trackable using only public data?
According to Elon Musk:
My plane is actually not trackable without using non-public data
This is a part of an ongoing controversy surrounding the bans on accounts posting the location of his private ...
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Does flying a small GA aircraft use less fuel than driving the same distance by car?
This is a notable claim by Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU party and a member of the German parliament:
„Ich bereue nicht, dass ich zur Hochzeit von Christian Lindner geflogen bin. Um es mal auf den ...
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Does aviation benefit from Daylight Savings Time?
In Europe, we have Daylight Saving Time, but a few years ago, the European Commission decided that must stop and instructed their members to choose a permanent time zone. For various reasons that hasn'...
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Are recent Southwest Airlines' operational problems caused by employees rejecting a vaccination mandate?
As Southwest Airlines faces a fourth day of canceled flights and other disruptions, claims have emerged -- largely in conservative media and social media circles -- that the company's problems are ...
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Is Argentina buying JF-17 Block-3 aircraft from Pakistan/China?
Is Argentina buying JF-17 aircraft?
Governo argentino reserva US$ 664 milhões para compra de caças JF-17 Thunder em 2022
According to the Aviacionline website, the draft budget for the fiscal year ...
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Is the Kabul evacuation "the largest airlift of people in history"?
As quoted here in an August 21 news piece:
“The President noted that this is the largest airlift of people in history and that it would not have been possible without the early support from Qatar to ...
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Did anyone ever do a round trip with a Concorde in a single day?
The Concorde was a supersonic passenger jet, with an average flight time around 3 hours and 30 minutes between London to New York. As can be seen here Complete List of Concorde Scheduled Flight ...
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Did the Wright brothers fly 105 times in 1904?
According to the Wright brothers, the two inventors flew 105 times in 1904 (near a streetcar station called Simms, situated at the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio).
O. Wright, “Letter to Carl Dienstbach”, ...
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Has the US Air Force studied squid to improve aircraft camouflage?
The Hawaiian bobtail squid is known to have a close relationship with a particular species of bacteria that lives within the squid. The bacteria are naturally bioluminescent, which is hypothesized to ...
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Is it harder to secure a place at NATS as an air traffic controller than securing a place at Oxford or Cambridge?
This question is about becoming an air traffic controller at National Air Traffic Services or NATS.
NATS is a UK company which runs air traffic control services. NATS makes sure aircraft can fly ...
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Can helicopters safely fly when it is raining?
A November 2018 story that has been recently resurrected in the media was about Donald Trump claiming that he didn't make a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris by helicopter because ...
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Were flight reservations centrally managed on wall boards in huge halls in the pre-computer era?
For the first fifty years of scheudled air travel, agents' bookings were done over the telephone. At first, charts recording space on particular flights were sheets of paper. Eventually, for large ...
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Are 40% of the world’s air cargo shipped on passenger planes?
I read on https://twitter.com/RichardBarrow/status/1250298370469416960 (mirror):
40% of the world’s air cargo is shipped on passenger planes.
Is that true?
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Are flight attendants exempt from COVID-19 quarantine restrictions when leaving New York or entering Canada?
Are the posts below true?
fathrowaway7. 2020 Mar 27 23:54 GMT.
I’m a flight attendant.
We are still flying because we are considered “essential.” You heard about those orders to quarantine ...
user16959
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Are more crash due to captain than first officer, because they ignore the first officer?
According to Outliers: The Story of Success from Malcolm Gladwell, more crashes are due to the captain than the first officer. He claims that the reason is that the captain ignore the warnings the ...
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Were the emission savings of Greta Thunberg's trip by boat outweighed by crew flights?
Greta Thunberg sailed from England to New York in a yacht.
Wikipedia explains:
The trip was announced as a carbon-neutral transatlantic crossing serving as a demonstration of Thunberg's declared ...
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Does Turkey make the "structural steel frame" for the F-35 fighter?
In a tweet of Donald Trump (which was also carried without commentary in this regard by the Washington Post) he says
So many people conveniently forget that Turkey is a big trading partner of the ...
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Is hemp 10 times stronger than steel and can it be used to build and fuel an aeroplane? [closed]
In the article World’s First Hemp Plane Will Be Stronger Than Steel And Run On Hemp Biofuel which was published on Truth theory, they claim there is a plane being built out of hemp, it will be fueled ...
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Did Winston Churchill praise Rolls-Royce engines?
In 1919, the world's first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight happened, and Rolls-Royce engines provided the power to make it happen. Marking the 100th anniversary of the 20th-century milestone, Rolls-...
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Does a return economy-class seat between London and San Francisco release 5.28 tonnes of CO2 equivalents?
I took this self-survey of CO2 emissions run by the German Environment Agency.
It computes for example that an economy class seat from London to San Francisco and back – about 22 hours flight &...
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Does having one fewer child reduce my carbon footprint as much as 71+ people going vegan?
In July 2017, ScienceMag reported on a study:
Eating no meat cuts an individual’s carbon footprint by 820 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year [...] by choosing to have one fewer child in ...
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Are fares for US transcontinental flights at an all-time low?
The Wall Street Journal published an article May 8, 2019 titled "Flying Coast-to-Coast Nonstop Has Rarely Been Cheaper." Part of the article is quoted below.
Flying coast-to-coast nonstop has ...
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Are 700 more planes a day expected to fly because of the Heathrow expansion?
Some people are protesting a proposed expansion of London Heathrow. I saw some protestors of the Heathrow expansion with signs that read "Stop 700 more planes a day".
Greenpeace tells me "A third ...
user49887
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Have more people "been to space than have flown in a B-2?"
According to Popular Mechanics (emphasis added):
More people have been to space than have flown in a B-2.
... A B-2 pilot at Whiteman [Air Force Base] told me that the number of astronauts who've ...
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Do EU countries have the right to close their airspace to a particular plane model?
According to this article in "el país" España delega en la UE la paralización del nuevo modelo 737 de Boeing, the Spanish government claims that
El Gobierno señala que no tiene competencias para ...
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Does Denver International Airport have Pneumatic Tube Systems?
From the Wikipedia page for the Pneumatic tube:
Denver International Airport [DEN] uses many pneumatic tube systems, including a 25 cm diameter system for moving aircraft parts to remote concourses, ...
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Does skip-lagging/hidden city travel make flights more expensive?
From a recent MarketWatch article, This airline sued a passenger for skipping his flight — why we should all take note, George Hobica claims that
“Hidden city cheaters make airfares more expensive ...
user41350
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Did Gustave Whitehead achieve powered flight before the Wright brothers? [duplicate]
Specifically, this question relates to Gustave Whitehead's achievement, credited with first flight by one state and evaluated by a growing number of historians. This question is specific to Gustave ...
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Did President Carter state that the United States had developed "an invisible plane"?
The book The Presidents and UFOs: A Secret History from FDR to Obama says:
Prior to the 1980 election Carter had stated in a news conference that the U.S. had developed “an invisible plane” which ...
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Is the F-35 aircraft literally invisible? [closed]
Donald Trump said of the F-35 "You can’t see it. You literally can’t see it. It’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see"
The video of him saying this makes it seem as if he really believes it can't be ...
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Did Pakistan supply an F-16 fighter jet to China for reverse engineering?
According to Bharat Karnad, in an opinion published in the Hindustan Times in 2017:
PAF long ago passed on an F-16 to China for its aircraft designers to study and to reverse engineer many of its ...
user42178
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Is travelling by car better for preventing climate change than by plane?
From the Fairfax website traveller.com.au: Tourism and environmental damage: How travellers are ruining the world:
Some friends of mine have stopped travelling. Pretty much, anyway.
They're ...
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Do airlines increase price on repeat visits?
Where I live in the UK it is a common statement that looking around on comparison websites such as GoCompare or holiday websites such as BritishAirways will result in them using various methods to ...
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Has 2017 been the safest year in commercial aviation?
President Trump seems to be implying that him being strict on commercial aviation led to 2017 having been "the best and safest year on record". When reading carefully, he does not claim that ...
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Has president Trump been "very strict on Commercial Aviation"?
President Trump seems to be implying that him being strict on commercial aviation led to 2017 having been "the best and safest year on record". When reading carefully, he does not claim that ...
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Did an Indian man make an airplane or flying device in 1895?
I've come across a lot of Indian sources claiming that an Indian man named Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade made an airplane or flying device in 1895.
Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade (1864 – 1916) was an Indian ...
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Did the US / UK supply the Russians with machinery before or during the Cold War?
I was reading this question on Quora, when I reached the last answer:
I visited the Tbilisi Aircraft factory at the end of the Cold War and was astonished to see that MIG fighter fuselages were ...
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Do airlines have a "Do not pair" list of pilots who don't want to work with each other?
What happens when your pilots just don't get along? claims that there are "Do not pair" lists where someone can request not to work with another pilot.
For this reason, co-pilots, or first ...
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Is paramotoring the safest form of personal aviation?
Paramotoring is the of sport of powered paragliding, where participants strap a 2 stroke motor to their back and a parachute, which they dub a wing, in order to fly.
Blackhawk Paramotor, America's (...
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Is there any evidence that laptops in airplanes might be used for terrorist attack?
For some airports in the Middle East passengers are not allowed to bring electronic devices bigger than smartphones into the cabins. According to some news pages (e.g. this article) this ban should be ...
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Do airlines in North America make around $10 profit per customer?
A quick google search returns several articles such as this one claiming that airlines make less than $10 in profit from each customer.
I feel there are a few reasons to doubt this premise:
You can ...
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Can the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter be detected by WW2 era radar?
According to Pierre Sprey, the technology to detect stealth aircraft (e.g. the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in air by radar has been around ever since the Battle of Britain (i.e. 1940, early World War II)...
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Can you eliminate La Guardia Airport and still move same amount of NYC passengers by air, but faster?
Joel Spolsky (I think) made this claim on latest Stack Exchange Overflow podcast that you can eliminate La Guardia airport in NYC, and even if 100% of La Guardia flyers started using the remaining two ...
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Are women in burqas never strip-searched by the TSA?
An article falsely attributed to Jeff Foxworthy has been doing the rounds:
US Message Board
The Political Insider
Truth of Fiction
Above Top Secret
It makes various claims and one of the claims are ...
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Is this picture of a bent propeller genuine?
This picture has been floating around the internet recently:
Is it a genuine picture or photo-shopped? Or perhaps its some sort of optical illusion similar to the wagon wheel effect?
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Were videos of the Flydubai Flight 981 crash published before the official crash time?
On March 19, 2016, Flydubai Flight 981 crashed in Russia.
It is reported (for example on English Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia to have crashed at 19 Mar 03:42 am MST (i.e. UTC+3) in City of Rostov-...
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Can aircraft be hacked and "commandeered remotely"?
This sensationalist article by John McAfee on Business Insider makes a number of unsupported claims about cybersecurity.
In the article, he claims that (emphasis mine):
For the purpose of our ...
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