102
votes
Accepted
Do airlines in North America make around $10 profit per customer?
TL:DR
United makes about $9.50 per passenger.
Detailed:
United Airlines Q4 and full year 2016 performance results offer a great starting point for these calculations.
We can see that United ...
- 2,101
91
votes
Accepted
Does the "survivorship bias" airplane diagram come from World War II research on returning war planes?
You can just look at the Wikipedia page for the very same image, and find the following information:
Description English: Illustration of hypothetical damage pattern on a WW2 bomber. Based on a ...
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84
votes
Accepted
Were the emission savings of Greta Thunberg's trip by boat outweighed by crew flights?
The Daily Mail words their claim as follows:
[The yacht skipper Nikki] Henderson's flight from Britain to the US likely produced the same amount of emissions the journey hoped to save, countering Ms ...
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73
votes
Does a return economy-class seat between London and San Francisco release 5.28 tonnes of CO2 equivalents?
Water vapor is indeed the most important greenhouse effect contributor.(Ref. 1)
It is usually not showing up in climate change discussions because mankind basically has no way of directly affecting ...
- 19k
61
votes
Was this Jet Blue airplane snowed in?
It didn't. You are looking at a pile of snow with an airplane some distance behind it.
Source: Try Modern magazine
In the first photo, the photographer simply took a pic of a snow pile at an angle ...
- 15.8k
61
votes
Accepted
Does flying a small GA aircraft use less fuel than driving the same distance by car?
This article (in German) has done further research and calculations that all seem to add up. Their verdict is that Friedrich Merz's flight did not use less fuel than other German cabinet member. In ...
- 1,344
59
votes
Is Elon Musk's jet trackable using only public data?
Yes, it does appear to be trackable with only publicly available data and it appears that Elon Musk is making various requests to make it harder to track his flights.
Reddit now has a subreddit ...
- 4,798
58
votes
Are 700 more planes a day expected to fly because of the Heathrow expansion?
Heathrow Airport has a "dedicated website" for the planned creation of an additional runway. From the dedicated website (emphasis added):
Heathrow Today
98% capacity – Flight movements at ...
- 14.1k
53
votes
Accepted
Were videos of the Flydubai Flight 981 crash published before the official crash time?
When trying to ascertain why timestamps seem to disagree with each other, it is often important to start with an accurate (as possible) timeline of the events being reported on
It is also helpful to ...
- 9,004
53
votes
Accepted
Did an AI-enabled drone attack the human operator in a simulation environment?
Apparently no, this was a purely hypothetical scenario, and the US Air Force has not run that experiment. This is the content of an update made today (2 June 2023) to the original blog post on the ...
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39
votes
Does Turkey make the "structural steel frame" for the F-35 fighter?
Bearing in mind subsequent changes (including the 2020 phase-out currently in the works), a 2013 press release by Northrop Grumman said:
Turkish Aerospace Industries, Inc. (TAI), a subcontractor to ...
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29
votes
Does Turkey make the "structural steel frame" for the F-35 fighter?
The F-35 made by Lockheed Martin is a joint venture by multiple countries; among others, USA, Canada, Italy and Turkey.
Turkey was part of the deal and they helped funding the development of the jet. ...
- 2,785
28
votes
Does Turkey make the "structural steel frame" for the F-35 fighter?
According to Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI)
One of the most complex structural sections of the aircraft, "F-35A Center Fuselage" is produced by TAI as a second source.
Second source means "a ...
- 104k
26
votes
Accepted
Has president Trump been "very strict on Commercial Aviation"?
This answer is making use of Daniel R Hicks' links in the comments of the question.
The Claim
Donald Trump's tweet's phrasing "Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation.&...
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25
votes
Accepted
Is this a photo of the result of a kamikaze attack on a ship in WWII?
According to Pacific Wrecks, a non-profit organization devoted to sharing information about the Pacific Theater of World War II and the Korean War, it does. The image description reads as:
HMS ...
- 30.2k
25
votes
Accepted
Is Elon Musk's jet trackable using only public data?
Musk should be enrolled in the PIA program.
But as mentioned in this article, it looks like they're using past behaviours to track him.
From the article:
It’s a laborious process, and codes cannot be ...
- 374
20
votes
Accepted
Is there any evidence that laptops in airplanes might be used for terrorist attack?
Your title and body ask different questions, but in Somalia last year, a bomb disguised as a laptop was used to attack a plane: 'Sophisticated' laptop bomb on Somali plane got through X-ray machine
...
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20
votes
Does having one fewer child reduce my carbon footprint as much as 71+ people going vegan?
To come up with the emission per child, the original source Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals Global Environmental Change Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2009, pages 14-20, is ...
- 104k
19
votes
Did an AI-enabled drone attack the human operator in a simulation environment?
According to the Vice article, the Air Force has denied the story:
"The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations [...]," Air Force spokesperson Ann ...
- 3,130
18
votes
Do airlines have a "Do not pair" list of pilots who don't want to work with each other?
Yes, "do not pair" lists do exist. They were brought in as one of the responses to the crash of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719. The accident was basically a CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain) ...
- 1,940
18
votes
Accepted
Did Winston Churchill praise Rolls-Royce engines?
There is no reason to doubt that Churchill explicitly mentioned Rolls-Royce in the context of the quote.
A Google Books search limited to books published before 1960 returns at least four publications ...
- 9,539
16
votes
Are women in burqas never strip-searched by the TSA?
No, it's false.
In New York, Muslim women can request private screening with a female officer (most security check points have a private room which they use for more advanced screenings). Huffington ...
- 15.7k
15
votes
Is the F-35 aircraft literally invisible?
Stealth is not invisibility. Rather, stealth gives the F-35 the ability to elude or greatly complicate an enemy’s ability to find and destroy an aircraft using a combination of design, tactics and ...
- 12k
15
votes
Accepted
Were flight reservations centrally managed on wall boards in huge halls in the pre-computer era?
I found a full account of pre-computerized reservation systems on Wikipedia's Reservisor article. The account is sourced to a single book, which I cannot get due to worldwide library closures, but ...
- 44.4k
15
votes
Is Elon Musk's jet trackable using only public data?
Musk's jet operates comercially, and registers its flight plans, which are a matter of public record in the US (Source). His jet also uses a transponder which broadcasts on a publicly available ...
- 671
14
votes
Can aircraft be hacked and "commandeered remotely"?
Evidence:
There is an application for a search warrant documented in court by FBI that a US hacker named Chris Roberts hacked into the electronic entertainment systems of airplanes [1] and that he ...
- 22.7k
14
votes
Does a return economy-class seat between London and San Francisco release 5.28 tonnes of CO2 equivalents?
Values from International Civil Aviation Organization cannot be correct.
Warning : very short calculation ahead. I hope it's alright for Skeptics.
One way to check if the results are plausible is to ...
- 488
14
votes
Accepted
Is the Kabul evacuation "the largest airlift of people in history"?
It appears to be correct for volume and pace in terms of evacuating civilians from a hostile environment, but it also depends how you define "airlift."
Most of the historical references to ...
- 5,413
12
votes
Do airlines in North America make around $10 profit per customer?
Generally, yes, but that's not necessarily an argument for overbooking as aggressively as they do (the context in which the claim was made). They don't make a huge amount of profit per customer, as ...
- 9,668
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible