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Critical Mach number is the mach number where some part of the airflow over an aircraft is moving at Mach 1 or greater. It happens more than you think, particularly when an aircraft is flying a bit faster than normal, usually trying to catch up on schedule. (were any of these flights running...

I just retired from flying the 747 for Qantas to places like Santiago. You are so far off the mark I can only conclude the post was an attempt at humour?

Looks like an oil stain to me. If not it’s probably a drain of some sort.

I’m doing three return trip in the next two months. Happy to host!

They have an inclination of 55 degrees so they are always visible where we fly over Antarctica. Even if they weren't, we still have three Laser Ring Gyro Inertial Navigation systems onboard that can navigate to the accuracy required. Many Flat Earth believers forget about those. I wonder how...

This time of year there is a strong jetstream blowing from the west present as a semi-permanent feature over NZ and Australia. As the aircraft climbs into it it experiences a massive increase in headwind. The only way to control the airspeed increase is to raise the nose which causes a large...

One of the interesting features of this video is that the shockwaves always present over the wing of an aircraft approaching the transonic speed range are revealed by the aerodynamic contrail also being formed by the wing and fuselage. Even though this 787 was probably cruising about Mach 0.85...

That reminds me. Water bottles can also be used to determine cloud tops. Looking out the front of an aircraft, objects at a distance from the aircraft at high altitude generally appear higher than they actually are. This is due to an optical illusion caused by the curvature of the Earth as it...

The Pitot/Static system on an airliner reads the air pressure and the Air Data Computers constantly uses this information and other inputs to determine both correct airspeed and altitude. Typically there are three altimeters working off three independent pitot/static systems; The Captains, First...

To complicate things slightly, aircraft at high altitude do not maintain an altitude above sea level or even follow the curvature of the Earth. Climbing above what is called the "Transition Level" pilots set a standard setting of 1013.25 HPa or 29.92 Hg and fly a cruise altitude based on that...

No, because we are IFR we'd need accurate terrain data. Normally in a 747 we would descend to 14000 feet during a depressurisation event, then eventually to 10,000 feet once the oxygen supplied to the passengers runs out. That vertical profile gives us better fuel range. If there is known...

all airliners are required to carry sufficient fuel to cope with a depressurisation or an engine failure at any point along the intended route, under instrument flight rules. The chart we use for SYD-SCL has about 75% of the continent as a no fly zone for this reason.

The practical problem for an airliner flying over the South Pole is lack of accurate relief data for terrain clearance in the case of a depressurisation. Also Perth-Buenos Aires is not a city pair which would have a great deal of traffic. So, no. I dont believe an airliner would have flown that...

Those pods are for target towing. Air to Air gunnery practice.

To get back to the OP you have some incorrect assumptions. NASA is not involved in operational Air Traffic Control, nor does it operate the GPS systems. ATC is a function of different country's civil air system, FAA in the US, Airservices in Australia etc etc. The GPS system is owned and...

I think this is where Flat earthers come undone. If you draw a line between Sydney and Santiago on that map it's pretty much what we fly. Hemispherism clouds the mind. The other is semantics. We aren't "tracked" per se as that implies radar or something else. The aircraft simply reports its GPS...

Yes, any westward flight is where this happens. Twice I have taken off about a minute after sunset and had the sun rise in the west as we climbed and headed towards Perth. The second sunset took almost an hour to occur. That can only happen with curvature. Psilguy, this is all fascinating but...

The Flat Earth is disproved by the tracks commecial airlines plan their flights by. Those tracks are congruent with operating on a sphere. The navigation systems on the aircraft are programmed to work on a sphere and the observations of flight crews are congruent with operating on a sphere...

Yes it is. We get tracked when we leave Sydney. We often fly over New Zealand where we get tracked and when we reach South America we get tracked again. Side note: Flight trackers don't use radar. They use the ADSB system.

The other question to ask is how can the substances ascribed by chemtrail believers; aluminium, barium and strontium etc, exhibit the trait of expansion without the dissipation that happens with every other substance (smoke oil, pesticides, fire suppressants, cloud seeding materials etc etc)...