>>1176682I like how people here join camp non-zero rolling friction and camp wheels don't propel the plane.
1. You start the engines
2. You get enough force to move the plane forwards.
3. As soon as the plane tries to move forward overcoming the wheel friction, the belt moves the whole thing backwards as far as it moved forward because the riddle assumes it does. It actually doesn't do the forths/backs thing but rather balances itself out as it happens. That's the assumption stated in the riddle.
4. No forwards movement means no airflow, means no lift.
5. You end up just pumping air backwards.
If the plane was on an infinitely though chain it would've been the same as this hypothetical conveyor belt of yours. The force it takes to stretch the chain would balance out what normally pushes the plane forwards. In this case, it's balanced out by this hypothetical conveyor belt.
The whole non-zero wheel friction thing assumes that the engines give infinite fucking thrust while the conveyor belt does not give infinite fucking 1:1 proportional but reversed speed.
If you wanna talk real life stuff - I do think that there are a lot of planes and not many conveyor belts big enough for a plane, and certainly not capable enough to balance out any modern plane engine thrust.
Nose wind thing is a good point and a sly approach. To negate the nose wind point you'd have to state that since the riddle doesn't approach the wind issue, there's no wind at all. And then, in order to have no wind at all you'd have to have no air at all because of how fucking molecules work - you'd need lotta-lotta force to keep one cubic milimeter of air totally stationary, let alone space needed to contain a plane and the fooken belt. You actually need lotta-lotta force to keep one cubic nanometer of void stable so stfu&rtfm&grow up. And if you keep the both the plane and the belt in a void, nothing moves, because plane engines rely on aerodynamics - no aero? no dynamics.
