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Subject: 
Re: Geography (was: We'll take in your poor....)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Wed, 14 Jul 2004 16:27:35 GMT
Viewed: 
2063 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Don Heyse wrote:
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks wrote:
Yeah, but LA to Boston is only 5 hours...he was flying east.

Last I checked, it's faster to fly west than east, since you'd be
flying into the planetary rotation instead of overtaking it.

Does this apply to driving, as well?  If so, I may have found a new
excuse for being late to work.

But a more serious question:  How big a factor *is* planetary rotation
vis a vis commercial jet travel?  I would have thought that, because
flights heading east or west both start at velocity=zero relative to
the Earth's rotation, the rotation wouldn't be that big a deal.  Is it
correspondingly harder to decelerate for landing when traveling west?

Still, I've never really thought about this before, so I'm easily
able to accept that I don't know what I'm talking about.

I think the issue is the jet stream.  It moves eastward somewhat faster
than the ground, so going east you have a tailwind, and going west you
have a headwind.

I'll buy that, except that the original claim seemed to be that the rotation
itself was the factor, not the jetstream.  Admittedly, I may have misunderstood
the framing of the problem:  perhaps the question of east/west travel already
assumed the impact of the jetstream, but I didn't realize it.

Better blame the dog.

I'll just claim that the Pentagon destroyed the only existing copy of my
work-schedule, which was on microfiche.

Dave!



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Geography (was: We'll take in your poor....)
 
(...) I think the issue is the jet stream. It moves eastward somewhat faster than the ground, so going east you have a tailwind, and going west you have a headwind. Unfortunately for you, the mountains in PA aren't high enough for this to make you (...) (20 years ago, 13-Jul-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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