More cool detail about a modern jet airliner than you thought imaginable all delivered in a cool 3D animation.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
The wings are crazy ! They look way too flimsy for what they do.
Next time you see an airplane, imagine a crane picking it up by the wings, around the middle of the wing length, and then start shaking it up.
It does not look like the wing will be able to hold that much weight.

I am a avgeek (aviation) and I love all things planes. Got my PPL and made it halfway through instrument before bailing but damn it, flying is the best thing in the world and aviation itself is absolutely fucking beautiful.
Wait until you find out how far off you are at 60 ton....
737-Max10 has a max take off weight of 101 tons....damn
640 tons for the An-225
Due to the nature of my work I've flown hundreds of passenger flights of all sizes and I still find myself in awe.
What a privilege to be able to actually see down from such a range of heights too. Where there is still lots of detail to be found, but you can also get an appreciation of scale. It's honestly really amazing.
My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.
The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don't see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn't static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn't move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn't as I imagined, at those speeds it's more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.
So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.
The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it's more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it's pretty much a bus.
In the air shows around here, they used to have a semi truck with some rockets strapped to the back that they'd race against a fighter jet.
The jet would come in low and when it crossed the starting line, the truck would take off from it.
The truck usually won.
Air shows might be big oil and military propaganda (that truck was owned and sponsored by Shell, iirc)...but damn if it wasn't cool as hell.
that and about 223,378 pounds of jet fuel then it flies
https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?specid=1699
In fitting natural conditions your house can fly too, just not whole and not for long
I mean, it's crazy, but I'm more fascinated with smaller airplanes. Imagine it, you can make something like a Piper Cub almost as easy\hard as 1000 years ago it was to make a good hauberk.
And for those mentioning computers - my feeling is the same about computers. It's nice to have a laptop with Linux or FreeBSD (not counting corporate malware), but a machine much simpler, but one that can be produced entirely in an area of 10mln people, full chain, would be much cooler for me.
I'm in awe of distributed production lines being possible and allowed by today's machinery.
I think that is something we have to rediscover. Centralization is stifling humanity's advancement. At the same time in the real world rather unpleasant people's power depends on it, so it won't be quick or easy. But I think it is happening anyway, just very slowly. Evolution, not revolution. Surely I would be glad for it to be a revolution, to see it as a (yet) young person.
you want to really bend your brain about airplanes, go looknhow the air conditioning on a big jet works. the phrase "air pack" will help in your search. I don't know which is more impressive, that it actually works or that someone thought of it.