102
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 recorded a Q4 net operating income of $397 million. In the same time frame, United recorded having moved 36.023 million passengers. This gives us a baseline ...
98
Yes, absolutely a plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th.
To address the claims specifically.
but did not even scuff up the grass
Do you know what airplanes do? They FLY. That this is even a claim is absolutely ludicrous and seems to be grasping at straws... Mike J. Wilson does a nice reconstruction of the crash that shows this gravity ...
90
We don't need the video evidence. Even without the footage from many angles, there is a plethora of eye-witness accounts testifying that a plane hit the South Tower.
Here's a small sample.
At that time Chief Ganci was behind me and he thought there was another explosion in the north tower and that's when I turned around and said Chief, listen, there is a ...
74
TL;DR; The F-15 is somewhat unique among current airframes, in that its body shape and size induce a certain amount of lift. That extra lift, along with the speed achievable with afterburners, allowed this aircraft to recover from an incident which would bring down most other aircraft.
The fact that we have a picture of this aircraft on the ground and ...
72
Although the person named existed and served in the Royal Flying Corps, the story itself is very likely not true.
First the good news. "Dattabraya Laxuman Patwardhan" certainly existed and was apparrently a member of the Royal Flying corps. The London Gazette of 25 March 1919 records his appointment to the temporary honorary rank of Second Lieutenant. The ...
72
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 the amount of water vapor in the air, either positively or negatively, as anything we could or could not do is utterly dwarfed by natural processes. (As opposed ...
62
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 that made it look like it was covering the aircraft, which in fact was actually behind the pile of snow (and a good way off as well).
60
Note that the URIs of the reports by the Dutch Safety Board seem to change from time to time as apparently their website gets reorganised. I'll try to keep the links in this answer up to date.
Failing that, the main page on the investigation of the crash of Flight MH17 seems to be stable enough and the reports are all linked from there. Another option is ...
58
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 Heathrow are capped at 480,000/year
473,000 flight movements a year (2016) – an average of 1,300 a day
Heathrow Expansion:
740,000 flight ...
53
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 keep things co-ordinated to a single point of reference with respect to time, so we'll use UTC.
Timeline
FDB981 Scheduled to arrive Rostov-on-Don at 18th ...
47
Yes, it is perfectly safe.
The United States FDA provides the following information.
Q8: Is it safe to eat food, drink beverages, use medicine, or apply cosmetics if any of these products have gone through a cabinet x-ray system?
A8: There are no known adverse effects from eating food, drinking beverages, using medicine, or applying cosmetics that ...
47
Unlike seatbelts found in cars, a seatbelt on an airplane isn't there to save you if the plane slams front first into the ground or is hit by a missile.
It's there to keep you safe in the event the plane makes a sudden move or has a minor accident. This commonly happens when flying through turbulence. Sudden movements could also happen during a bad ...
43
The question of airplane safety is a nice field to demonstrate the old quip that you shouldn't trust any statistic you haven't forged yourself.
It is crucial to define exactly what you mean by safe, and what you are comparing:
Are you interested in total deaths per year? Then the car is the most dangerous and, depending on the country you are looking at, ...
39
This is attributed to Bob Crandall, the American Airlines CEO of that timeframe. He was indeed a very driven individual to reduce cost and make money. This particular exploit is covered in a book called Corporate Creativity: how innovation and improvement actually happen By Alan G. Robinson, Sam Stern. The story is detailed on page 107, although there it ...
39
Does Ryanair use cookies to raise the price of their tickets after you have visited the site before?
This belief seemed to spread in April 2011 via twitter.
Due to Ryanair's reputation as being overly greedy at the cost of the consumer, I think many people have simply assumed that this claim was true.
It does not appear that it has been looked into too conclusively, but the investigations that have been done indicate that the claim is not true.
Popular ...
37
In the US, there appears to be no FAA requirement for the flight crew to require window blinds to be in any particular position.
FAR 91.103 - Preflight actions makes no mention of window blinds, nor does FAR 91.105 which covers the next phase of the flight (when the flight crew are at their stations).
The next relevant section is probably FAR 91.517 which ...
33
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, one of the first commercially successful aircraft (the Boeing 707) did a barrel roll during a demonstration flight. In case you don't believe my claim, here is a video to back up my claim:
Boeing 707 Barrel Roll - Pilot Tex Johnston Performs Roll In Dash-80 Prototype Aircraft In 1955.
In 1994, FedEx Flight 705 (A DC-10), ...
33
Further to Articuno's answer.
This is part of an inscription where one king's name was later overwritten with another's.
from The Abydos-Hieroglyph does NOT depict a Helicopter
From helicopter hieroglyphs explained
33
The footage of the South Tower hit exemplifies several anomalies, including a Boeing 767 flying at an impossible speed, an impossible entry into the building
There is ample documentation and physical evidence of aircraft parts at and near the WTC site in the day after crash that seem improbable without there having been an impact.
http://911research.wtc7....
30
The pay of pilots covers a huge spectrum. Experienced plots for major airlines are well paid. However the pilots of regional airlines and commuter lines are sometimes paid much much less. This is partly because there is a glut of pilots right now, and also because pilots use these jobs as a way to gain the experience they need to be hired by the major ...
30
While it is of course almost impossible to debunk a conspiracy theory (there is always a counter-rebuttal if you don't mind how improbable you get) here are a few points that would clearly indicate the ridiculousness of the idea.
Contrails predate the jet age. High-flying aircraft of both sides in WW2 left them; if they were truly sprays of mind-control ...
30
Apparently yes.
There was extensive news coverage of this, which eventually points back to this ABC News report from June 1st, 2015. The report references an internal government report, which is not published on the TSA's website with other public or partially redacted reports, at least at this time.
The news story states "undercover investigators were ...
24
Is there any first hand evidence, accessible to the public, showing MH17 was shot down?
No, nor should we expect any.
As in almost all cases, the public do not have direct personal access to evidence of the causes of an aircraft loss. For example, It is not possible for me to visit the site of the wreckage and I lack the forensic expertise to make an ...
24
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 Sussex hull impact by kamikaze Ki-51 Sonia
And, is credited to:
Credit: Royal Navy Date: July 26, 1945. B&W
Pacific Wrecks says it owns the copyright of ...
23
The story is slightly less dramatic than it sounds.
The runways themselves are not being "shifted" (i.e. construction crews getting out and laying tarmac), but just renamed and signposted.
From a Livescience report
Runways are designated according to the points on a compass, and the drifting magnetic north means that they, periodically, need to be ...
23
No, it was flying its usual path, same as it was flying for months before the event. Here is the path of the same flight day before (a bit to the South):
Here is the same flight on 13th of June (a bit to the North):
And here is the downed plane's flight path:
It is evident that such deviations are not atypical for this flight.
21
I've long thought this graphic gives a good idea of the issue
The problem at an airport is variation in local magnetic declination, not the variation in location of the magnetic north pole. Due to local magnetic anomalies, magnetic compasses rarely point at any magnetic north pole.
As others have noted, Runway naming is mostly based on local magnetic north ...
21
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." is, perhaps typically, not very precise. Asked about details, the White House released a statement quoted by factcheck.org:
“Last year, the President announced ...
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